Gaming

There's no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.

There's a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that it's a complicated topic outside of their reach, but it's honestly not. Like any technology, there's two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if you're a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know it's an append only database with a fully public history. That's all it is. So ask yourself how you could ever make that an interesting part of a game that would entice players to ... anything really. At best/worst it'll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games aren't clamoring for.

But more to the point, anything stored in a database needs to be actionable by a governing body. In terms of videogames, this is the game itself. The game is the authority on what can and can't be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you can't change the rules of the game, they're hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if I'm making my points clear enough, but does that follow? There's zero benefit to the public blockchain vs. an internal database because the game is the final authority and going to action on it the same either way. Owning something on the blockchain is useless, anyone who knows anything about games at all always knew that line about transferring items between games is total BS.

Any cryptobros already furiously typing out a response, don't bother. I'll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but I've heard most of the arguments before and they just don't even bear responding to so ya know ...

Yeah I've been wondering the same thing too, like what's the point? I've seen some devs try to use blockchain for tracking ownership of items, so you could trade/sell items to others and it would all be tracked and verified through the blockchain. But if you're playing a game that's hosted by a centralized server, then just use a database. I don't see any benefit for a decentralized blockchain when you're playing on a centralized server.

It's all just buzzword bingo.

We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!

That's just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.

You can transfer game items from one game to another game!

This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn't really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.

The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I'm not convinced of myself), games aren't one of them.

The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto "millionaires/billionaires" need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin "fortunes" into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of "the future" (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).

The only justification I’ve ever been able to think of is Pokémon. The idea is supposed to be that every Pokémon is unique but there’s actually only a limited set of variables to define each individual ‘mon. I can trade you a Zubat I just caught and it can be identical to one that I first caught in Fire Red twenty years ago and have traded through every game since.

If each Pokémon was truly unique and on the blockchain, it could be meaningful in ways they currently aren’t. There could be only one Coalossal that Wolfe Glick won the Player’s Cup with. He could trade it away for charity and someone would pay for it. I could trade Pokémon away and track them as they’re traded around the world.

It’d be cool. But it would not meaningfully make the game more fun. And it’s Nintendo so they’re never going to do blockchain. And that is the best pitch I can give you.

The most successful example for a blockchain game is "Axie Infinity" which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique "Axies" (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like "Axie Infinity" was "play-to-earn", games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in "Axie Infinity".

Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.

The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.

As a footnote: The use of blockchain in "Axie Infinity" ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.

Simple rule of thumb; any time someone says blockchain in a sentence, replace it with "big slow database". Now you can think about it clearly.

It's mostly hype from the marketing team pushed onto developers. 90% of use cases of block chain are just over eager MBAs pushing developers to add blockchain so they can be excited about it.

For this, it's probably NFTs, which are guaranteed to be unique, but... the cool thing about blockchain is that the guarantee is true even in a decentralized service. A video game company is centralized, they can make whatever they want unique already. So it's 99% likely to just be a buzzword.

There are some really good uses of blockchain. A decentralized steam-like platform would be amazing. A decentralized venmo/paypal. The ownership of a game would be great to have on a blockchain so even if a company goes out of business you can still say you own this game. Any game mechanics themselves are stupid.

So far it seems to be to make money off gold grinding in the Philippines if Axie Infinity is any indication.

Most of the supposed benefits of blockchain in gaming would either never actually be realized due to the infeasibility, or would be just as easily implemented using alternative, pre-existing methods.

It's only purpose is to monetize your gameplay time with some kind of real world "value".

Everything else is just the lies they tell you to get away with enshitifying the game.

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.

Or better yet, games where you get monopoly money for pretending to do a job in the game

Backface culling provides efficiency and performance. Blockchains provide nothing that can't already be done through more efficient means. There is literally no viable use case for blockchain or NFTs in video games, which is exactly why every implementation has righteously failed or never got off the ground to begin with.

That's an iffy analogy. Backface culling makes for a higher frame rate, which makes the game more enjoyable (or playable at all).

That's the biggest issue with a lot of Blockchain or micro transaction games; they are first and foremost a way to make money for the company. Look at any web3.0 nft game on the market. All the marketing is "play to earn" bullshit. If a company really wanted NFTs or whatever to take off, make an exciting, engaging, fun to play game and then you can get a player base nft or no.