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Does Gameplay Matter in Blockchain Games? | MMORPG.com
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Does Gameplay Matter in Blockchain Games? | MMORPG.com
In this episode of MMONFT, we dive into everything game related in Ember Sword with Bright Star Studios founder and Ember Sword executive producer Loren Roosendaal.
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Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
So how do you tell if a game is taking the second model? If they don't try to make you pay anything for the game until they've at least got a beta or trial version available to play, then you know they're taking the second model. Ember Sword is, well, not doing that.
Pregame item sales should be treated as an investment in the game. Not a pledge or donation, but an investment. A piece of the game that you have the right to sell if you don't like the direction, or for profit if you choose.
edit - I'm certainly not giving investment advise or my seal of approval to Ember Sword.
I will stand by this method being much better than any similar method done off-chain without NFTs. This method is also 1000 times better than kickstarter.
DYOR if you like the game toss a 20, 30, 50 bucks just like any other pre-order. If unsure, wait to play the game. If you don't like it don't invest.
As to whether it's better or worse to spend $50 to buy NFTs ahead of time than a pre-order, outside of the rare situation where you know that you're going to buy the game anyway, I'd argue that they're both a bad idea and for the same reasons.
Aaaah I might see the disconnect. You don't believe it is possible to invest in the development of a game. Am I correct?
You need to decide first if it's a game you want to play. 2nd, do you think they will be able to complete the game. 3rd how much are you comfortable investing. If you can say yes to the first two, enoy the ride.
Myself, it's not the type of game that i will probably want to play. Therefore I wont be investing. I'll wait for the launch then maybe give it a shot.
Normally investments are in particular game development companies, not particular games. Buying control of a particular game so that you can modify and sell it could be an investment. I don't think this is normally done, but a legally binding deal that you'll pay a company $X today and in return, they'll pay you Y% of the revenue that the game ever makes would be an investment.
NFT values are only tangentially related to how a game performs, and not really an investment in the game itself. They're much closer to buying artwork or collectibles in hopes of reselling them for more. That's not really an investment unless you run a company that helps would-be buyers of the collectibles get ahold of goods that are hard to find, which probably won't really be a thing with NFTs.
You could buy NFTs in a game before it launches, have the game be tremendously successful commercially, and still lose money on the NFTs. Conversely, the game could be a complete flop, and you could still make money on the NFTs if you can find someone willing to buy them for more than you paid before people realize that the game is a disaster. For a true investment in a game, you'd expect the value of your investment to be much more strongly correlated with the game's commercial success.
Game NFTs are going to be extremely vulnerable to losing value as a result of gameplay changes that a company makes. Imagine, for example, that there was an NFT for each epic item that drops in WoW, and that buying the NFT lets you use the item. What happens to the value of old NFTs when a new expansion launches? That's quite far from the only way that NFTs could have their value swing wildly as developers make changes to games that make particular items far less useful (or occasionally more useful) than they were before.
It's also important to recognize that game developers have very strong incentives to make old items lose value. Game developers don't make money off of people who bought old items reselling the NFTs. They make money off of people wanting to buy the new items--the new generation of NFTs. And for that to work, they need for the new generation to be highly desired, more so than the old ones.
For purely cosmetic NFTs, the old ones might well keep their value for quite a while. Or people might decide that the cosmetics just aren't interesting, and the latest and greatest could quickly end up worthless. But for anything that has gameplay advantages attached, such as epic weapons, you'd better assume that the company is eventually going to do something that makes it worthless. That's really not an investment.
To be fair, there could be alternative control options available. There are games that have click to move as an option but not the only one. But if there are other options, showing the worst possible way to play the game is a pretty awful way to advertise it.
The one point that I strongly diagree with is - "Game developers don't make money off of people who bought old items reselling the NFTs." I would dare to say Zed Run makes more off the resale of horse by current players than buy new players. Same with Axie.
Thus far none of these old "items" haven't lost value. They've gained in value with every single new item created. If it were the other way around these games would fail almost instantly.
There is a different paradigm right now, in this moment with these types of games. Again look at Axie. The relationship between developer and player is much stronger.
This may change with the likes of EA. At the same time EA will probably do exaclty what we expect. Hmmm good stuff here Quizz. Let's separate EA mmorpg/mmo from EA Sports.
Legends don't get worse from year to year in EA Sports games. They stay rare legends. I think what you may be describing is something inherent in todays mmorpgs. Patch after patch year after year old items get worse. Why?
As things stand in games like Zed and Axie people grind to get old horses, old axie. They become more and more valuble as you go further down the line. These models have demonstrated that you don't have to wreck what came before in order to keep people playing. Why does it work?
Deep in the weeds again. What if your items stayed strong in WoW. What if people grinded to get those old legendaries. Not the ones they make 15 years later and call legendaries, but those original 1000, 10000 items that were ever made. Think about how these games would fundamentally different.
Anyways thanks for helping me think.
If the old gear is the most desirable, then that breaks gameplay for a lot of games. A game like WoW is very heavily based on getting new and better gear. If you've already got the best gear in the game, then what do you do? They could make a game based around doing content after you've gotten your gear, and I'd actually prefer that games do that, Guild Wars 1 style. But that would be a totally different game, and I'm not sure how much of a market for it there would be. I haven't seen an MMO-like game go that route since Guild Wars 1.
The thing about Ponzi schemes is that the value keeps going up until suddenly it doesn't. Would you be interested in an investment that would predictably gain 20% of its value each year? A whole lot of people would, as that's an incredibly good investment.
But would you buy an investment that will predictably lose 20% of its value each year? Of course you wouldn't want that. But once the perception switches from expecting prices to go up to expecting them to go down instead, the price can drop in a hurry. If everyone expects the price to go down, then no one will want to buy, and the price can drop to $0 very quickly. Bernie Madoff's investment fund went from being worth about $65 billion to nothing more than a legal right to file some clawback lawsuits practically overnight. I expect to see some cryptocurrencies follow that route, too, except without the clawbacks.
With stocks and commodities, there is some underlying value. If a business is making profits of $10 million per year and you reasonably expect that to continue for the foreseeable future, and then its stock tanks to the point that you can buy the entire business outright for $5 million, that can be a very profitable investment even if it's impossible to ever sell the business. But game-based NFTs don't necessarily have any underlying value that prevents prices from dropping precipitously.
As always I love to hear your thoughts on these blockchain games. One thing that this video (as well as part 2) and article didn't do is really review the merits of the combat system in the demo. I know I touched on my enjoyment of it just briefly, but I think it's important to note that what I tested was a very early build of the game. Even earlier than the technical test Ember Sword is planning in 2022.
While a lot is subject to change, I really enjoyed the demo for what it was. Yes, the combat is click-to-move, and has a MOBA feel to it, which means your skills and positioning are integral to killing enemies. It's no different than games like Lost Ark in that regard.
As Loren mentions in the video, they plan to bring the game to consoles, so I anticipate controller support in the future, which would likely alleviate some of the click-to-move misgivings some of you may have.
I know that there is a healthy skepticism here on blockchain games, especially when it comes to early monetization. I'm not going to prognosticate on the future success of Ember Sword yet, but I won't deny that I enjoyed the gameplay in the demo a lot more than I thought.
As these episodes continue and I work towards both spotlighting the good and calling out the bad aspects of blockchain, I hope you all continue to watch and weigh in on these games and features.
NFT's are generally minted using smart contracts. These kinds of contracts basically give instructions when something specific is met, like the sale of the NFT.
The instructions can and usually do include a fee to the original creator. That means no matter how many times you sell the virtual item the original creator (the game company) will receive a small fee. Usually less than 10% of the sale price. In other cases there are transaction fees per sale on a market.
So in games where you create NFTs out of thin air, like crafting a sword, the smart contracts are built in so developers will get money when you sell the item, but you get money too. The main difference is when you sell that to BCBully and then he sells it to me, Crytpo Swords the game continues to get paid and you no longer do.
They get money on the initial sale of the nft, and every sale thereafter on a scale based on a percentage of the sale, compounded by the frequency of sales. Think about how many transactions happen on an auction house per day.
The real problem is the initial buy in. Some games let you in for free to earn NFTs and sell them to start a bankroll. Most don't and require you buy in, and the buy in is steep, like axie.
As to is it a MMORPG or MOBA the same, I don't see a vision here apart from a revenue one. What I am not seeing is Steve doing a critique here, but to be fair before it has launched that would be presumptive.
Putting money into a cryptocurrency game is only an investment if your definition of investment includes extremely high risk. For most people that's too risky, likewise savings with their small interest rate are not typically considered an investment because the return is too low.
There is a lot to explain.
All the way from what is blockchain, to setting up a wallet (RPCs chains etc), to tokens, to NFTS, to NFTs in games.
After all of that, THEN start to showcase games and how they implement the technology.
Imho this will provide a better product for both gamers and developers.
Right or wrong, people don't come here to then have to go do research. They come here to read the research that has been done for them, in a neat tiddy article.
How much?
2-3% would be me, but I’m not greedy
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
If they have to shut the lights off for whatever reason, these NFT games.
What happens to your pixels? How do they retain their value?
risk vs reward
Unless I get an emotional/chemical charge from buying and trading in this stuff, it’s a foolish investment.
These companies should show us some drafts of their TOS’s and EULA’s along with an Alpha of the game play
imho
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
It would be very strange for people who aren't willing to pay very much for a game to be willing to suddenly start being willing to pay massive amounts of money after playing it for several months or a year. It would likewise be very strange for people who have long since quit a game entirely to decide to pour more money into improving a character that they will never again play.
What happens to the size of games' playerbases as time passes? If blockchain games are proper games, then they're hardly the first games to ever exist, so we can learn a lot by looking at the rest of the history of the gaming industry. Most games peak near their launch day. Some peak a week or a month later, and some peak in beta before the official launch.
But it's very rare for games to have playerbases that continue growing for years after full launch (as opposed to the first early access). Some developers are fond of noting that the number of accounts created all time keeps rising even after most of their players have moved on, but that's misleading. There are a handful of games that grow for years after launch, but for the most part, the real question is whether a year after launch, a game will have 50% of its peak playerbase or 20% or 3% or have already pulled the plug on the game.
Based on this, one would expect that, starting not very long after launch, the total market value of all NFTs in a blockchain game will start to decrease. We haven't necessarily seen this yet, as there aren't any blockchain games that had their full launch five years ago. For the most part, we're discussing pre-alphas early in development, or occasionally open betas. But if they're games, then it's surely going to happen.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the value of your NFTs will be proportional to the size of the game's playerbase. Rather, that's the total value of all NFTs for a given game. And what will happen to the number of NFTs out there as a game matures? I'd expect it to tend to increase as the game's developers create more of them. In some cases, they'll directly create and sell them to players. In other cases, they'll be implicitly created by gameplay.
So even if the size of the playerbase remains the same indefinitely, so that the total value of all NFTs remains the same, the same total value divided among more NFTs will mean that the average NFT will tend to decline in value. Perhaps some will keep their value pretty well while others quickly become worthless. But regardless, the average will tend to be that they decline in value.
Ponzi schemes only work so long as they seem to be making money, and the value seems to be going up. Once people realize that it's a bad investment, they can collapse very, very quickly. Blockchain game NFTs will tend to have tremendous downward pressures on their values that cryptocurrencies don't. There will still be some money to be made by people who buy in early and sell right around launch when the game is at its peak. And there will be some money to be made by people who buy in early and get lucky that they ended up with a huge hit. There will likely be a blockchain game at some point that is an enormous success, akin to World of Warcraft, League of Legends, or Counter Strike, though its launch could easily be several years away.
But most blockchain game NFTs will end up worthless, and people who try to treat them as investments will tend to lose much of the money. If you want to gamble, that's fine, but Vegas will give you better odds, and pay out your winnings far more quickly.
If you happen to make that money back through crafting or whatever AWESOME. If not atleast you enjoy the game.
If you spent more than you should hoping to get rich and you don't that's your problem no one elses.
Now if your goal is to make money. Everything you said needs to be taken in to account. You need to do your research to see if your theories hold true. You need to have the conviction to act either way.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Imo the only thing a gamer should expect, is to play the game they spent money on/invested in.