So, it’s Roblox for people who like spreadsheets, NFTs and spaceships?
Hard to get too much detail on it yet. But looks like you’ll be able to build market tools (probably smart contracts) and other functionality.
If any game can leverage a public blockchain properly, it’s EVE. They’ve already got market driven economies and an in-game currency. Both historically annoyingly locked behind a TOS, limited APIs, and heavy-handed control of CCP.
Their community marketing system to unlock the closed beta looks like some bullshit though. I gotta perform actions like tweeting their trailer to get tickets to get access to the beta. I’ll pass.
Lmfao using smart contract functionality for an in-game currency actually makes a ton of sense. It’s basically just a more extensible version of any in-game currency.
The caveat I think of is fees required to transact being a potential issue, otherwise the article just screams of “I hate block chain and refuse to see how it could be used in any way”
What makes a block chain better than a PostgresDB for a private currency that can only be spent in their stores?
Extensibility, lots of collaborative development work across the crypto landscape rather then only being done by the company producing the game.
A quick obvious example mentioned was smart contracts, a company attempting to create that functionality from the ground up would be a lot more work then hooking into an already existing infrastructure where many lessons have already been learned from prior failures.
It doesn’t actually state in the article (because the writer was mostly just whining that crypto exists) but I am curious if the idea would be for the tokens to be transacted or utilized outside of the game itself in some fashion while still being completely track able.
Edit: It’d kinda be like instead of using a standard email format/protocol, developing a whole new “electronic mail messaging system” from the ground up. Why do that when the functionality you want has already been created and heavily documented.
Edit2: Going back to my prior point about potential for transacting outside of the game itself, if a company wanted to make that happen, they’d have to build all the infrastructure/APIs/etc to interact with the database.
The main thing I’m wondering from all this is what the actual use case is for being able to do transactions outside of the game. For both the actual Eve online and the vast majority of survival games, being able to trade player to player is plenty.
There is a lot of transactions that end up taking place “off game” with things like casinos/gambling being a specific example for EVE. Rather then having to trust that you’ll get your isk (I never played but watched the down the rabbit hole on EVE, which is great BTW, and watched from afar throughout the years).
With a smart contract system, there wouldn’t be the same concerns that things aren’t being distributed properly, unless there’s a bug in how the smart contract was written, which absolutely can and has happened, but at least it’d all be publicly viewable. That’s one thing I very much appreciate about the idea of crypto in general, transparency in where money is moving.
I’m sure there’s other potentials but that one stuck out to me as gambling was a rather large part of eve history.
Using gambling as your first example when talking about use cases for crypto doesn’t exactly paint it in a good light
Nah yeah I don’t disagree, I’m not a fan of gambling, I just know it was prevelant within Eve and generally prefer systems that are potentially more fair.
Similarly, I’m not a fan of prostitution, but I’d be in favor of legalizing it in the US so that they have more protection under the law. Edit: Because the reality is, people are going to do these things, so harm reduction should be the key ingredient, and I would consider a transparent smart contract system for paying out gambling winnings in a consistent manner without the possibility of being ripped off a better end-state then people potentially being ripped off because of shady dealings.
Edit2: Here’s a potentially better example, I know everyone hates NFTs because of the idiotic popularity of images as NFTs, but a legitamite use would be for digital ownership of in-game goods.
Edit3: To further add to that idea, if all player items are attached as an NFT that they “own”, one could build smart contracts for something as simple as letting another player “borrow” an item for a predetermined amount of time, then it reverts back to the owner.
Reminded me of the old RS days with “free gem cutting” scammers.
In theory the game dev could build a system to make that kind of thing possible natively, but with a smart contract system built in instead, it’s much less overhead on the company itself and users could potentially create smart contracts for all sorts of situations on their own.
Another simple one would be since current eve operates “businesses” one could make a smart contract for paying out from the “company” coffers to its workers, rather then manually requiring someone to be a literal in game accountant.
Edit4: ooo or automated extremely customizable shopfronts for in-game items that could be both in-game and/or standalone sites that can just function off the block chain contracts for handling ownership, once again potentially bypassing a need for the game developer to develop/maintain any kind of API for handling trades in that fashion.
Edit5: last one I promise. I think a lot of people are anti-blockchain/crypto for a lot of valid reasons such as:
Scams: yeah there’s a lot of rug pull examples, price manipulation, lying about feature set, fraud, etc… but nothing about the concept of the blockchain is a scam, just like in any other forms of individual ownership systems, the problem is really human greed. NFTs going for insane prices was extremely stupid, but that wasn’t even cutting the surface on the potential use cases for NFTs as a transparent digital ownership tool, but it’s been so tainted by the greed and manipulation of the first use case that caught on.
Power use: Proof of Work blockchains use a shitload of power and would use more and more as time went on most likely as difficulty increases, I’d still love to see a comparison of how much energy the global banking system uses to compare to but I digress, it is a real issue. ETH moved to a Proof of Stake system in the not so distant past and now requires much less energy to function, I haven’t kept up too much with how it’s actually gone, but it hasn’t crashed and burned yet so, assuming it works and can remain secure from unintended changes, it seems like a better way to go then PoW.
Inability to reverse transactions: This is a big one and it’s a hard problem to solve without some sort of real governing body, which is kinda the opposite of the point of crypto since the code is supposed to rule. Idk what to do about that one.
