Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
One reason to include blockchain tech in games is to enable trading of in-game assets without needing to build a trading engine from scratch. It also offers the chance to tie in-game assets directly to real-world values, and have certain assets be useful across games in a franchise. Basically everything Magic The Gathering or Pokémon does, except that you don’t have to worry about the cards deteriorating as you use them.
Once you realize that Magic and Pokémon were just cardstock NFTs all along, the whole idea of NFTs in gaming start to make more sense. Not every application that the the Crypto Bros propose to solve with NFTs are really appropriate, but some are.
TCGs use fungible resources, though. Except for very rare cases like misprints or limited releases, two cards are completely interchangeable so long as they’re the same card. I could maybe see Pokemon using NFTs because they’re supposed to be your special semi-sentient animal friend, so making them non-fungible is a natural progression. They’ve approximated this with IV and PV, but ultimately you can still clone your shiny pikachu with hacks. An NFT pokemon could have a personal history on the blockchain (battles/contests won/lost, grooming/play sessions, parental/trainer involvement, regions they’ve seen, battle partners they’ve had, etc etc etc) which affects its behavior in subtle ways that simple numbers can’t achieve. You could do this without NFTs using a centralized service, but I given the radical backwards and forwards compatibility of the games decentralization might make it a lot simpler to implement.
Note too that this is a strictly non-financial application of NFT. You could potentially exchange money out-of-band like you would in selling a card, but it doesn’t require the pokemon cost anything. If I were to implement it, I’d probably avoid calling it “NFT” like the plague because it’d pull in cryptobros like a swarm of locusts and ruin the fun for normal people who don’t want to pay $3000 for a Zigzagoon.
In a way, maybe, but not in a way that it solves a problem in a novel and useful way. It solves a solved problem in a worse way.
I won’t necessarily dispute that.
If Blockchain tech really did solve a gaming problem in a unique way, it would be done under the hood, in such a way that developers and modders could use it to add value, but casual gamers wouldn’t even realize it was being used. However, it’s harder to get funding based on buzzwords that way.
This is a very good point - it isn’t (and can’t be) a feature, it will only ever be an implementation detail unless you’re selling snake oil.