Alt text
The year is 2030. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon. You’ve just finished mining 30 obsidian ore playing Crypto Crush Saga, a match-3 mobile game.
You open up The Elder Chains Online and feel a rush of excitement. Your buddy from school has spent the last 2 years becoming a Master Blacksmith, and he has agreed to turn 10 obsidian ore into an Obsidian Battlestaff, a HUGE upgrade over the Mithril Mace you’ve been wielding for the last weeks.
It’ll take him an hour or so. In the meantime, you hop into Clash of Guilds, and use the remaining obsidian to upgrade your town hall to the next level. That should keep your village safe for now.
You wish you could fast forward time to tonight. Your Guild has plans to go for a deep run into the wilderness in Old School Rune Chains, and your prospects of a successful run (and great loot) have never been better.
All members have been spending the past 2 weeks grinding for better weapons, and you’ve agreed (through a vote) to use the Guild treasury to buy everyone a new full set of Red Dragonhide Armor.
Tonight’s objective is to kill the level 128 Frost Giant hiding in the Cave of Sorrow. He has a 5% chance of dropping an Immaculate Orb of Brilliance, of which there are currently only 4 in existence.
The Orb can be used as a power source in an upcoming space exploration game, and should give your guild a great advantage in reaching distant galaxies first. A 5% drop rate is low, but you’re feeling optimistic.
In the distance, you hear a faint ‘BloCkChAIn doEsNT bRiNg AnYtHiNg nEW tO gAmES’. You shrug, and join your friends in the Discord voice channel.
Life is good.
#blockchaingaming
You’ll be shocked to learn that this guy is now in the AI space.
Let’s assume that you actually want games interconnected like this (nobody wants this): Why do these people think they need blockchains for this?
Games could just offer an API that offers information about what a player has done. The other game can then just query it and done! Maybe add in some verification. What supposed advantage does a block chain offer here? Each block just stores some data and the hash of the previous one.
This is the one good usecase of blockchain. If you have a network of untrusted users (which in this case could either be the games or the users) but need to distribute a trustworthy ledger of transactions information without a single trusted party, a blockchain works pretty well. Granted, if you have a trusted party, the entire thing becomes overkill. I could see a blockchain being a reasonable solution here if you’re trying to connect all games and don’t want to give anyone an unfair advantage, but it’s a niche datastructure.
Pretty sure this has been possible with the Steam “inventory” thing for like two decades. Why use a blockchain when pretty much everyone is using the same servers, overseen by a single centralized authority?
Nobody actually cares enough to do anything with it, of course. Not even valve, not really.