The General State of Gaming NFTs in 2022 *spawn*
- Thread starter Shortbread
- Start date
From the video, it seems their NFT opinion is mostly born from the current negative sentiment around blockchain either due to climate change or GPU scarcity. And quite a bit of lack of knowledge around what the tech is and its roadmap. I am very familiarized with the subject, and watching the video left me doing awkward face expressions at some of their opinions.
- Lets address the main issue raised, the climate impact making it a "dirty" technology.
The energy consumption discussed on popular news outlets that leads to the current negative sentiment on blockchain mostly refer to Bitcoin. But NFT's cannot work on Bitcoin, they work on the far superior tech Ethereum. This is very important to know before forming an opinion. Because even though Bitcoin consumes 178 TWh compared to Ethereum's 79 TWh, the tech roadmaps of both Bitcoin and Ethereum could not be any more different. Ethereum is currently switching from hash power incentive to secure the network (PoW = GPU's), to financial incentive to secure the network (PoS). The new PoS method is estimated to use >1% of the current 79 TWh. So this is one less argument that can be thrown on NFT's face.
So, does it currently (today) use too much power for what you get? yes. Is the technology evolving to solve it? yes, in 2022/23!
- Lets address the secondary issue raised, that what NFT's do can already be done in current in-game marketplaces.
This misconception is a big one. It really demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge around what blockchain and NFT are. The items you currently win during your playtime during a game, exist only at the discretion of the company who sold you the game. Their servers, their terms of service, their items, not yours. Every year you see games switching off their servers, and with them all your history and collectibles. With blockchain, there are not proprietary servers, the database lives in hundreds of thousands of servers self-regulated by algorithms. Each user owns a crypto wallet inside the blockchain and the NFT mechanism proposes that each item you win or collect in-game is uniquely identified and recognized by the blockchain (like a serial number of authenticity) and sent to your wallet. It becomes a token forever yours, and some of them will naturaly gain a monetary value due to scarcity or rarity because there are always people willing to pay for stuff, and will open a new form of income for dedicated gamers.
- Lets address the third issue raised, companies trying to use NFT to obtain another income method from their games.
Little to say here, because its not an issue born from the blockchain. The blockchain didn't gave birth to micro-transactions and it doesn't care of its use cases. You can criticize the companies from trying to explore another income source, but not the NFT or the blockchain, which are merely state-of-the-art tools. NFT's are also not responsible from the quick get-rich schemes people are using it for outside of gaming. Again, the technology does not care of the use people give it.
All in all, lots of misconceptions and foundational gaps of knowledge regarding blockchain and NFT's. The negative sentiment of the video comes from popular thought schools present in the media, of which the three DF presenters are not immune to at this point in time, sadly.
- Lets address the main issue raised, the climate impact making it a "dirty" technology.
The energy consumption discussed on popular news outlets that leads to the current negative sentiment on blockchain mostly refer to Bitcoin. But NFT's cannot work on Bitcoin, they work on the far superior tech Ethereum. This is very important to know before forming an opinion. Because even though Bitcoin consumes 178 TWh compared to Ethereum's 79 TWh, the tech roadmaps of both Bitcoin and Ethereum could not be any more different. Ethereum is currently switching from hash power incentive to secure the network (PoW = GPU's), to financial incentive to secure the network (PoS). The new PoS method is estimated to use >1% of the current 79 TWh. So this is one less argument that can be thrown on NFT's face.
So, does it currently (today) use too much power for what you get? yes. Is the technology evolving to solve it? yes, in 2022/23!
- Lets address the secondary issue raised, that what NFT's do can already be done in current in-game marketplaces.
This misconception is a big one. It really demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge around what blockchain and NFT are. The items you currently win during your playtime during a game, exist only at the discretion of the company who sold you the game. Their servers, their terms of service, their items, not yours. Every year you see games switching off their servers, and with them all your history and collectibles. With blockchain, there are not proprietary servers, the database lives in hundreds of thousands of servers self-regulated by algorithms. Each user owns a crypto wallet inside the blockchain and the NFT mechanism proposes that each item you win or collect in-game is uniquely identified and recognized by the blockchain (like a serial number of authenticity) and sent to your wallet. It becomes a token forever yours, and some of them will naturaly gain a monetary value due to scarcity or rarity because there are always people willing to pay for stuff, and will open a new form of income for dedicated gamers.
- Lets address the third issue raised, companies trying to use NFT to obtain another income method from their games.
Little to say here, because its not an issue born from the blockchain. The blockchain didn't gave birth to micro-transactions and it doesn't care of its use cases. You can criticize the companies from trying to explore another income source, but not the NFT or the blockchain, which are merely state-of-the-art tools. NFT's are also not responsible from the quick get-rich schemes people are using it for outside of gaming. Again, the technology does not care of the use people give it.
All in all, lots of misconceptions and foundational gaps of knowledge regarding blockchain and NFT's. The negative sentiment of the video comes from popular thought schools present in the media, of which the three DF presenters are not immune to at this point in time, sadly.
There is a small error in your explanation. If the game servers are shut down, you may still have your "legitimation" to posses an item, but this item really only works on those servers which were shut down. NFT in games is just a way to give something a more "unique" look and they try to speak to your inner addiction to collect things. If an item is rare, people want to have it. But the problem here is, this is an artificial limitation just to do exactly that. Create a demand for something rare where nothing really is rare.
I just try to translate that to the game Diablo. You find a unique sword with stats nobody can find. But the algorithm/developer just created that for this purpose so they can "sell" (even through a shopping system) those items to there customers.
So how much do you have invested in NFT's exactly?
Like everything, there can be good uses of technology, but let's face it, this is the games industry where we have seen what they have done with loot boxes and monetization. They have lost all goodwill because of their own history of abuse with other schemes. Odds are NFTs will be no different.
I will gladly contribute further to the knowledge on blockchain and NFTs if anyone demonstrates the interest. But I obviously will not go down to the level of discussion you are after.
I may be facing the risk of repeating myself again. But when you play a game and earn collectibles (for which NFT's did nothing to the creation of this concept. Its exists for a long time before blockchain), you agree with the terms of usage dictated by said company. Matters of legality if you own or not an item that was deleted when their servers shutdown, may not apply, and such an issue should never depend on corporations.
There is a great movement growing spearheaded by John from DF, with regards to videogame preservation, fueled by the "fluid" state of current games which depend on servers and updates to be considered "complete", and that disappear when servers are shutdown. NFT technology addresses what you cannot preserve by saving a copy of a disc. It can preserve your playtime achievements, items, collectibles.
There is merit to both preserve the actual games and what you win in them. NFT technology is not the problem, its a solution, which suffers from being attached to the negative sentiment of the gaming community towards blockchain due to mining and misinformation I tried to explain in my last post.
No. Even at 1% of its power requirements, Etherium 2.0 is 10x to 1000x more power hungry than direct, server driven transactions. The underlying concept of consensus driven transactions has to be far less power efficient that direct transactions as a principle of thermodynamics. If 120 clients need to reach consensus to validate a transaction as per Etherium 2.0, as I understand it, that's still 120x the number of computers as need for a single transaction, each one encrypting and decrypting and transmitting data. And these computers are home PCs, whereas a server system can be designed to be as power efficient as possible, both in choice of silicon (low power ARMs versus desktop AMD/Intel) and optimising the operating environment.
The cost needed to achieve this is of course far higher than would be necessary if gaming organised a server-driven database. Furthermore, there's nothing stopping game providers allowing you to back up all your content - it's just flags enabling content that already exists in a game, by and large. So really, the problem could be addressed with other solutions. Blockchain here is looking for a problem to justify itself and isn't the ideal solution in and of itself. Furthermore, if a blockchain system dies because people give up on it, all that content is lost anyway. Of course, if the blockchain gets too big for people to be able to turn away from it, then we'll have to invest resources in maintaining it. And THAT is where the problem truly lies, where more transactions are moved to the blockchain that needn't be, and the ecological costs of doing ecommerce of any sort increases 100-fold over what it needs to be while accomplishing very, very little real gains.
Although conceptually true, the reason d'etre for Blockchain at the moment is making money, not solving problems. It's being pushed because the companies pushing it are seeing opportunities to make big bucks, nothing more. If they cared about what they were doing, they would have pulled the plug years ago when it became apparent Bitcoin was a dead end, and sit on the idea until someone could come up with a non-environment-destroying concept. However, people farmed because they could sell coin to people with money who'd buy coin with a view to selling it to make a profit. Not a single meaningful problem being addressed, just people chasing money.
In essence, it was an idea someone tried. Upon experimentation, it's clearly a dumb idea in almost all cases its used. It should be shelved and reconsidered when 1) A need arises which other solutions can't provide and 2) it can be executed with no more overhead than other solutions.
It is absolutely moronic to introduce new, energy sapping ideas at a point in humanity when the environment is at a critical point and we should be doing everything we can to minimise our impact and increase the time we have to invent long-term solutions like fusion power.
No-one anywhere should be advocating blockchain. I doubt anyone that is advocating it isn't doing so without a vested interest either because they have invested in cryptocurrency or they intend to leverage blockchain to make money.
It's a necessary negative sentiment. If people just shrug their shoulders, NFTs will happen and the damage will be irreversible when all the content sits on the blockchain. The only way to prevent this shit taking hold is to resist. We're not talking the Luddites raging against the machines displacing their jobs here - we're talking a change driven solely by people who can see a way to make money, and not by people trying to advance humanity and solve real problems.
The only thing about a NFT concept that I like, is the idea that digital game licenses are sold as NFT and can be traded/sold as part of that license you own.
We can straight up remove discs altogether, predatory practices around disc insurance, and have some control over what happens when a digital marketplace shuts down your title.
Outside of that, I'm not really seeing any benefit to me as the user and all the downsides that Shifty explained above take effect.
Other ideas on what NFTs could do are actually pretty cool possibilities; but lets be realistic about it, not only would game design have to change dramatically, but players behaviours towards games would need to change as well. If you want ot make exclusive items etc, like say in WoW you only release a single Legendary weapon, and only 1 character has it, and that is a NFT weapon that needs to be traded/sold as NFT - designers and players need to come to an understanding that only 1 person ever gets that weapon.
And here's the thing, I've seen MMOs go in this direction somewhat, and they pull this off without NFT - See EvE Online. Or See Star Wars when players finally started to become Jedi.
All amazing stories. But only a handful of players experience it, not sure if that makes a lot of sense.
And what about the Diablo 3 Real money Auction house? They had to remove that AH from teh game because it straight up ruined the game. The AH ruined diablo lol.
We can straight up remove discs altogether, predatory practices around disc insurance, and have some control over what happens when a digital marketplace shuts down your title.
Outside of that, I'm not really seeing any benefit to me as the user and all the downsides that Shifty explained above take effect.
Other ideas on what NFTs could do are actually pretty cool possibilities; but lets be realistic about it, not only would game design have to change dramatically, but players behaviours towards games would need to change as well. If you want ot make exclusive items etc, like say in WoW you only release a single Legendary weapon, and only 1 character has it, and that is a NFT weapon that needs to be traded/sold as NFT - designers and players need to come to an understanding that only 1 person ever gets that weapon.
And here's the thing, I've seen MMOs go in this direction somewhat, and they pull this off without NFT - See EvE Online. Or See Star Wars when players finally started to become Jedi.
All amazing stories. But only a handful of players experience it, not sure if that makes a lot of sense.
And what about the Diablo 3 Real money Auction house? They had to remove that AH from teh game because it straight up ruined the game. The AH ruined diablo lol.
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Also NFT allows the creator to take part in secondary sales as the NFT creator can write a royalty fee condition into their smart contract on the block chain. Anytime the NFT is sold the creator gets a cut. Less of an argument on the publishers or devs part of how the used market negatively impacts the retail market. However, I doubt if games will ever be sold in this manner as the current DD model kills secondary sales outright.
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amen, resist the cult
no offense dskneo when you say
"So, does it currently (today) use too much power for what you get? yes. Is the technology evolving to solve it? yes, in 2022/23!"
What the fuck are you talking about, mate at the moment
1 transaction of bitcoin energy use = ~2 billion visa transactions https://www.marketwatch.com/story/h...ng-the-energy-to-mine-one-bitcoin-11639127573
OK etheruem uses 12x less than bitcoin, plus the eth 2.0 will be even 100x better than that, that still equals
!#$%$!!! (carry the 1) !#$#@$%
OK my calculator on my shoulders saiz a million times more energy than a single visa transaction
In what version of reality is this considered 'being solved'
sorry for sounding harsh, but like some of the vaccine shit, this BS propaganda needs to be killed ASAP or else ppl end up believing it
Silent_Buddha
Legend
As you've noted pretty much anything an NFT can do, a properly designed conventional system can do more efficiently.
Used game sales of digital licenses? MS had already planned for that with XBO, but the console gaming community reacted violently to all games being just digital licenses. Normal people have no problems with digital licenses on their phone or PC.
Digital content providers getting a cut of used game sales? Again, something that MS had planned and was working on for the XBO ecosystem. Again, something that the console gaming community reacted negatively to.
Moving game licenses between storefronts/hosting services? Certainly could be done, but requires enough consumer desire for it that companies are incentivized to create such systems. You can, however, see some fledgling steps in that direction with consumer desire for Crossplay eventually forcing the 2 major console competitors + PC to enable it. Cross-Buy/Cross-Ownership across platforms also exists to a limited degree already between mobile, PC and a far more limited extent consoles. It's still not remotely on the level of being able to move your digital license to a different storefront/hosting service, but it's showing some movement in that direction.
Currently, everything I see about NFTs are aligned around quick cash grabs and an underlying design that trades efficiency (grossly so) for distributed systems that make it more difficult, but not necessarily impossible for any one entity to control. However, that same distributed nature means that it also easily enables shady practices with little ability to enforce properly framed transactions or correct errors (either human error or machine error) that may happen. There are so many stories of people being swindled out of their NFT. On a traditional system there are potential avenues for a consumer to regain ownership of something they may have been swindled out of or lost due to human/machine error. NFTs? Nope, once it's changed ownership, nothing you can do. Once you lose ownership due to human/machine error, it's gone...
Regards,
SB
Blockchain tech is mainly about decentralization while maintaining trust. I don't see any real purpose for the current big players in the gaming market to adopt the technology because a central authority (themselves) is not a problem for them. Plus when the central authority maintains its own hardware, transactions don't need to be validated across 100s of servers or PCs spread across the internet.
Also crypto/NFT and all the current metaverse hype seems like a cart before the horse proposition. Technically metaverses have existed for some time but the current hype seems to be driven by the need to find a utility case for crypto. Hence you see the crypto well before you see the associated metaverse on a lot of these endeavors.
Also crypto/NFT and all the current metaverse hype seems like a cart before the horse proposition. Technically metaverses have existed for some time but the current hype seems to be driven by the need to find a utility case for crypto. Hence you see the crypto well before you see the associated metaverse on a lot of these endeavors.
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amen, resist the cult
no offense dskneo when you say
"So, does it currently (today) use too much power for what you get? yes. Is the technology evolving to solve it? yes, in 2022/23!"
What the fuck are you talking about, mate at the moment
1 transaction of bitcoin energy use = ~2 billion visa transactions https://www.marketwatch.com/story/h...ng-the-energy-to-mine-one-bitcoin-11639127573
OK etheruem uses 12x less than bitcoin, plus the eth 2.0 will be even 100x better than that, that still equals
!#$%$!!! (carry the 1) !#$#@$%
OK my calculator on my shoulders saiz a million times more energy than a single visa transaction
In what version of reality is this considered 'being solved'
sorry for sounding harsh, but like some of the vaccine shit, this BS propaganda needs to be killed ASAP or else ppl end up believing it
Its not 1 bitcoin transaction = 2 billion visa transaction. Its more like it would take 2 billion visa transactions to produce enough computational power to generate one mined bitcoin.
Bitcoin was $57K back in November when a bitcoin transaction cost about $1.80. So it would take roughly 32K bitcoin transactions to generate 1 bitcoin worth of fees. So its more like 62K visa transactions = 1 bitcoin transaction.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
I am taking this at face value and it might be wrong. But LOLZ!
I am taking this at face value and it might be wrong. But LOLZ!
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
There are a lot of benefits to blockchain like smart contracts that most people on this forum have no clue about, and NFTs for gaming might work if they can be made persistent enough to survive a game getting decommissioned, like a weapon that can be used in any Assassin's Creed game for instance.
I would love to see them try importing a weapon or character to all assassin creeds. (Without blockchain.)
Also release information on how long it took to make the it work in each game. (And detailed list of problems, solutions and failures..)
Pretty sure developers are deep enough in trenches even without the added pressure.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
LoL, so NFTs are actually less secure than digital products stored in traditional systems. At least in that case.
Scratch that, basically NFTs are just as secure as current conventional digital ownership of digital items. IE - it's as secure as the person offering the NFT wants it to be and can be bothered to make it.
The problem there is that there is little incentive to make an NFT secure since there is no centralized repository for any them. So there's no accountability if something goes wrong. Once you sell the NFT to someone, what do you care what happens to it? If it gets changed, hijacked, stolen, whatever, who cares? So, zero incentive to ensure data security and integrity of any NFT you sell.
And to top it off, any sale of an NFT requires vastly more resources than a conventional transaction for something that is most likely going to be less secure.
Sure, you'll "own" the token, but the digital product associated with the token may or may not be what you originally bought and that token still doesn't prevent anyone form copying that item.
Holy shit, I can already see all the new potential avenues of hacking games considering how there's no requirement for data security or integrity of an NFT beyond the token associated with the object.
NFTs - The scammers paradise.
Regards,
SB