So this is some kind of blockchain thing? The article just kind of dives in and I’m lacking context, but it seems interesting. Can anyone give a brief overview?
Sounds like whale-catching mobile games on a much bigger scale; Create a fake world with a bunch of fake restrictions, line up a bunch of bored computer nerds, get them to feel superior over one another by demonstrating their wealth with the purchase of expensive bits and bytes.
The cryptocurrency talk is just the mumbo jumbo to catch the idiots. It’s like those alternative healthcare practitioners who sprinkle in the words “study” and “research” to make their quackery sound legit to the unsuspecting.
I'd probably venture low-poly 'stylised' as their game graphic. Admittedly Mirandus isn't out for pre-alpha till 2nd half 2021 but they do give sneak preview posts weekly if time permits - https://gogalagames.medium.com/mirandus-monday-a-broader-vie...
I remember most SL players at least being near break even, often times bulk selling hair styles or furniture to pay for activities. Though then again I also remember sinking $60 in a single month to develop out an ingame research laboratory...
I'll try, but I'm not a fan, so I may get it wrong and/or fail to disguise my (negative) feelings.
Imagine an MMORPG that uses a blockchain economy not only for currency transactions but also for secure storage of items. Today, we take for granted the 'vault' space offered in games, but by storing items and currency both on the blockchain, new opportunities for in-app purchase become available that players will surely enjoy interacting with.
In this article, a 'bank' is sold for $800,000 USD, and the purchaser of that 'bank' will, presumably, get a fractional share of the revenue from all 'vault this item' paid transactions. Since payment can occur either using in-game currency and/or real money transactions, and presuming they get a blockchain currency listed on Coinbase, the owner of the castle will be able to cash out their revenue stream into their real world bank account.
I'm probably missing some subtle aspect of the specifics here, but that's what I took away from it. I assume the creator of the game is hoping that the SEC will not realize that this is an $800,000 investment in a public offering of stock in their still-vaporware game. I also assume that by taking advantage of the Coinbase tax-paperwork infrastructure, the game's operators will attempt to have no legal obligation to register as a financial institution, or otherwise owe any regulatory debt.
You may find value in reading the novel 'REAMDE' as it spends some amount of time walking through the implications of a world where you can earn real money using virtual gameplay.
I read a few sentences and am wondering what an NFT is. I’m familiar with OpenSea but there really is not much explanation here for people not already deeply embedded in this world.
Non-Fungible Token. Which is the name of the protocol standard, and the abbreviation has evolved into a colloquialism in the art/game/collector world that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the protocol standard.
But it is referring to unique collectibles. The blockchain protocol aspect improves on the pricing and provenance of the asset, as one can prove when it was created (before or after another similar one, for proof of the original creation), and the exact amount paid for it at that time, to better illuminate prior market value. The art world has had trouble with all of this for millenia including in the present.
Man, I really don't get the point of this. (And I mean the game in general, not just the sale of this franchise.) It's like blockchain play-acting.
Using a blockchain to track the status of objects which only exist within an online game, and which are only accessible within that game, makes no sense to me. Ultimately, the status of those objects is subject to the whims of the game and its operator, not the blockchain -- since they control the rules of the game. If they want to make the game stop recognizing your "property", or change what it represents in game, that's always something they can do; throwing a blockchain at it doesn't change that.
Also: I can't help but feel really suspicious about a game whose primary feature appears to be its monetization strategy, rather than its gameplay. (Read the rest of the blog -- there's virtually nothing in there about what the game actually is!) Does anyone actually play these games to have fun, or is it just a way for cryptocurrency fans to find even more esoteric things to invest in?
It looks to me like its in the same vein as Pokemon Cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, etc. Very few people actually "play". They just collect for the sake of collecting, and they buy out of fear of missing out on exclusives.
It isn't a model that appeals to everyone, but it appeals really well to some whales, hence it exists.
Well, you wouldn't buy Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering cards if you hadn't at least spent some time playing. Those are games which have had, at least at some point in their lifespan, large communities of players. I kinda doubt rich people are randomly buying mint alpha Black Lotus cards with no knowledge of the game?
Side note: you can still fail with this type of monetization even if the game is huge (see: Diablo 3 auction house). Once you screw up the economy or drive away the player base, it's hard to recover.
At least with pokemon, my friends and I all collected cards growing up, and none of us ever played the game (mainly because we were children who didn't understand the rules).
I don't think I've ever met anyone who collects but doesn't actively play these games. However I've met tons of people who play casually and don't really collect.
I'm with you that there are definitely a lot of players. But recently, speculation on/collection of Pokemon cards in particular has become kind of a big thing.
Even there, the reason those cards are considered valuable is ultimately because people played the game. Not necessarily the same people who are collecting the cards now, but that's where it started. There are hundreds of other CCGs from the 90s whose cards are basically worthless today because the game was a commercial failure.
The creator was ex-Zynga, so of course it's largely built around a whale-first monetization strategy. Even more dangerously, it's inside of a game that appears to be largely vaporware, and has no high-profile company to give weight to the virtual items. At least you know Blizzard or Epic will be around for a while, these people could be bankrupt tomorrow and all you'd own is a worthless (and expensive) Ethereum transaction.
I'd also bet that this "sale" is an inside job, given that the virtual nonsense was purchased by another scammy blockchain gaming company via "Polyient Games Unity Tokens", and the $800K is based on the market cap of some obscure, illiquid token.
"and which are only accessible within that game" - this isn't correct. The concept of public blockchain allows these NFTs to be used anywhere that also uses that blockchain. They have mentioned this in another article on their ecosystem. https://gogalagames.medium.com/the-gala-games-node-ecosystem...
"Used anywhere" implies that an in-game item has a use outside that game. While it's technically possible that another game might decide to "honor" these items, in practice that's almost certainly not going to happen.
Whilst I agree this may not necessarily be put into practice by other games, Gala Games is also said to be using select NFT items across multiple games in their platforms too. They have already demonstrated collaborations with other games in the blockchain space so it wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine that a sharing of NFT between partners might follow.
"who is that said by? By you?" By their devs, by their media, on their website, in their discord, at their AMA's. Planning already for their second game alpha release which is what the entire thread here is about ie the 800K NFT sale prep for Mirandus.
I recently tried out a game backed by a block chain. I had uninstalled it quite quickly because it was taking dozens of seconds to load a level because my previous actions had to be saved to the block chain. Maybe they picked a poor implementation of block chain to go with, but sacrificing performance for any of the benefits of being on a block chain is not a trade off I see worth while in games in general. Players care about loading screens far more than they care about their items being on a block chain rather than a database.
This absolutely isn't the case with the BETA product (TownStar) already available for free play on the Gala Games platform if you want to check the implementation.
This is true of anything "on the chain." The world can just decide to not care what the chain says.
I would argue games are the only place where this situation is reasonable as the gamers desire self enforcement (or there is no game).
In other situations with DRM (which is what the chain if being used for, DRM) it's trying to force the user to stop themselves. Here the community can police itself.
You're right that trusting a closed source game to stay up is crazy, but people "buy" digital goods all the time. That situation is not unique.
The fact that co-founder of Zynga and creative director of FarmVille 2 are behind this enterprise is extremely telling.
A few thoughts:
1. There is a small-but-non-trivial segment of gamers that are willing to spend huge amounts of money for in-game privileges.
2. There is a similar, somewhat-overlapping segment of gamers willing to spend huge amounts of time on a game, if that huge amount of time is rewarded with things that can't be accessed any other way (think grinding for top-tier rewards in a game like Path of Exile, some things just aren't accessible if you don't spend 1000+ hours)
3. Asia is driving the leading edge of game monetization now, and that leading edge is gacha games (lootbox mechanics/disguised digital slot machines).
Looks like a couple of experts on extracting money from casual gamers have turned their attention to the whale/core gamers, and this attempt is blockchain-flavored. As a sibling comment (duskwuff) pointed out, blockchain is irrelevant to the actual value in-game of the item. The devs can change the game world to make your $1k sword irrelevant, and based on how these kinds of games usually go, they probably will - and the whale gamers will gladly open up their wallets to gamble on the latest and greatest.
There is nothing innovative or exciting about Mirandus at all, unless you are looking for the fastest and most efficient way to fleece gamers - in fact, the Minecraft aesthetic feels like a little bit of a giveaway to the devs' real goals - lower the technical requirements to cast as wide a net as possible to pull in as many whales as possible.
Maybe I'm wrong and this is the start of an Ethereum-powered future where digital goods are freed from platforms, but I doubt it. Most likely this is a digital cash grab that will launch to massive early-backer-funded fanfare, but will sink into the abyss of forgotten gacha games, once the devs have made their millions and start looking for a new target. Just like all the others.
They'll run out of money before they attract enough whales to survive, because I don't see anything resembling a fun game here. It's like Minecraft, if you were farming for meaningless loot boxes all day.
Just read some of these insane quotes:
"The game will also have 1,000 farm bots which can mine a token, like a Bitcoin miner. You can buy a loot box, assemble the parts to make a farm bot, and set them loose mining. Or you can just buy a farm bot preassembled at an expensive price.
Then you can mine the currency and provide them to other players in the game, either by giving it away or selling it.
“It’s a way to compensate people who really believe in us in the beginning,” Schiermeyer said. “That’s how we’re structuring the blockchain. The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
The last quote makes this entire thing look like a scam to fleece gamers/gambling addicts and then (probably) run away with the money.
I mean, I will not at all be surprised if this is, at its core, an ICO-style con. It has blockchain, it has early 'investors' throwing money at it with the promise of exclusivity or scarcity, it's probably designed to reel in people hoping for the next Bitcoin, as if there ever would be one of those now. The main article is full of quotes about the scarcity of resources that will instantly get a lot of gullible people's attention.
This report of someone spending 800k already might well even be part of the scam, the same way any con artist on the street will have stooges pretending to throw in cash in order to convince others that it's legit.
The creators will roll along with the hype for a bit, and then take all that wonderful, liquid cash and ride off into the sunset, leaving everyone else's appendages (and useless digital 'assets') flapping in the breeze.
> This report of someone spending 800k already might well even be part of the scam, the same way any con artist on the street will have stooges pretending to throw in cash in order to convince others that it's legit.
That's exactly what it is. This sale was to their "partner" company Polyient Games, and they're putting 10 more up for auction next week. This sale was to anchor the price.
>The game will also have 1,000 farm bots which can mine a token, like a Bitcoin miner. You can buy a loot box, assemble the parts to make a farm bot, and set them loose mining. Or you can just buy a farm bot preassembled at an expensive price.
>The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
So it's designed with pretty much the worst aspect of long running online games in mind and is pretty much a loot box farming game where you're mining for what is hopefully a chance at building something that might get you what essentially supposed to be a new digital currency?
> Then you can mine the currency and provide them to other players in the game, either by giving it away or selling it.
> “It’s a way to compensate people who really believe in us in the beginning,” Schiermeyer said. “That’s how we’re structuring the blockchain. The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
So, uh, it's a pyramid scheme, thinly disguised as a game?
Conversely if you don't get in on the first wave then there's little reason to come in later because you'll never catch up no matter how well you play.
> 3. Asia is driving the leading edge of game monetization now, and that leading edge is gacha games (lootbox mechanics/disguised digital slot machines).
There's nothing leading edge about this. Both western and eastern video game companies have been doing this for more than a decade.
An infamous example is EA, who have been sucking the fun out of their games with this for ages. Bonus points to them for slapping these mechanics on paid games which they sell en-masse by exploiting franchises popular with mass-market consumers, then extracting additional money using the sunk cost fallacy.
Note for those surprised by the price tag and talking about whales: this is not like your typical in-game purchase like a special sword, unique mount, or even skins in CS:GO. These tokens implement core gameplay functionality that other players will have to pay to use -- think dungeons in Legend of Zelda, but if another player could own a dungeon and you had to pay them to go inside. So really, these people are buying a stake in the game with the expectation of profiting if the game is a success.
I expect the SEC will be all over this once they catch up. It took them long enough to take action against XRP though which is pretty open-and-shut, so this might take a while.
47 comments
[ 12.3 ms ] story [ 671 ms ] threadThe cryptocurrency talk is just the mumbo jumbo to catch the idiots. It’s like those alternative healthcare practitioners who sprinkle in the words “study” and “research” to make their quackery sound legit to the unsuspecting.
Imagine an MMORPG that uses a blockchain economy not only for currency transactions but also for secure storage of items. Today, we take for granted the 'vault' space offered in games, but by storing items and currency both on the blockchain, new opportunities for in-app purchase become available that players will surely enjoy interacting with.
In this article, a 'bank' is sold for $800,000 USD, and the purchaser of that 'bank' will, presumably, get a fractional share of the revenue from all 'vault this item' paid transactions. Since payment can occur either using in-game currency and/or real money transactions, and presuming they get a blockchain currency listed on Coinbase, the owner of the castle will be able to cash out their revenue stream into their real world bank account.
I'm probably missing some subtle aspect of the specifics here, but that's what I took away from it. I assume the creator of the game is hoping that the SEC will not realize that this is an $800,000 investment in a public offering of stock in their still-vaporware game. I also assume that by taking advantage of the Coinbase tax-paperwork infrastructure, the game's operators will attempt to have no legal obligation to register as a financial institution, or otherwise owe any regulatory debt.
You may find value in reading the novel 'REAMDE' as it spends some amount of time walking through the implications of a world where you can earn real money using virtual gameplay.
https://egamers.io/this-new-mmorpg-sells-5-citadels-for-1-36...
But it is referring to unique collectibles. The blockchain protocol aspect improves on the pricing and provenance of the asset, as one can prove when it was created (before or after another similar one, for proof of the original creation), and the exact amount paid for it at that time, to better illuminate prior market value. The art world has had trouble with all of this for millenia including in the present.
Using a blockchain to track the status of objects which only exist within an online game, and which are only accessible within that game, makes no sense to me. Ultimately, the status of those objects is subject to the whims of the game and its operator, not the blockchain -- since they control the rules of the game. If they want to make the game stop recognizing your "property", or change what it represents in game, that's always something they can do; throwing a blockchain at it doesn't change that.
Also: I can't help but feel really suspicious about a game whose primary feature appears to be its monetization strategy, rather than its gameplay. (Read the rest of the blog -- there's virtually nothing in there about what the game actually is!) Does anyone actually play these games to have fun, or is it just a way for cryptocurrency fans to find even more esoteric things to invest in?
It isn't a model that appeals to everyone, but it appeals really well to some whales, hence it exists.
Side note: you can still fail with this type of monetization even if the game is huge (see: Diablo 3 auction house). Once you screw up the economy or drive away the player base, it's hard to recover.
They absolutely are.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/07/accused-pharmaceutical-fraud...
I don't think I've ever met anyone who collects but doesn't actively play these games. However I've met tons of people who play casually and don't really collect.
[1]https://kotaku.com/twitch-streamers-are-opening-90s-pokemon-...
I'd also bet that this "sale" is an inside job, given that the virtual nonsense was purchased by another scammy blockchain gaming company via "Polyient Games Unity Tokens", and the $800K is based on the market cap of some obscure, illiquid token.
> Polyient Games is an investment firm focused on the non-fungible token (NFT) and blockchain gaming industries.
800k makes more sense if it is also an investment and includes equity.
"They have already demonstrated"... where? Across what games? I only see one.
I would argue games are the only place where this situation is reasonable as the gamers desire self enforcement (or there is no game).
In other situations with DRM (which is what the chain if being used for, DRM) it's trying to force the user to stop themselves. Here the community can police itself.
You're right that trusting a closed source game to stay up is crazy, but people "buy" digital goods all the time. That situation is not unique.
(Wasn't Star Citizen bad enough for monetizing not-yet-created in-game items?)
A few thoughts:
1. There is a small-but-non-trivial segment of gamers that are willing to spend huge amounts of money for in-game privileges.
2. There is a similar, somewhat-overlapping segment of gamers willing to spend huge amounts of time on a game, if that huge amount of time is rewarded with things that can't be accessed any other way (think grinding for top-tier rewards in a game like Path of Exile, some things just aren't accessible if you don't spend 1000+ hours)
3. Asia is driving the leading edge of game monetization now, and that leading edge is gacha games (lootbox mechanics/disguised digital slot machines).
Looks like a couple of experts on extracting money from casual gamers have turned their attention to the whale/core gamers, and this attempt is blockchain-flavored. As a sibling comment (duskwuff) pointed out, blockchain is irrelevant to the actual value in-game of the item. The devs can change the game world to make your $1k sword irrelevant, and based on how these kinds of games usually go, they probably will - and the whale gamers will gladly open up their wallets to gamble on the latest and greatest.
There is nothing innovative or exciting about Mirandus at all, unless you are looking for the fastest and most efficient way to fleece gamers - in fact, the Minecraft aesthetic feels like a little bit of a giveaway to the devs' real goals - lower the technical requirements to cast as wide a net as possible to pull in as many whales as possible.
Maybe I'm wrong and this is the start of an Ethereum-powered future where digital goods are freed from platforms, but I doubt it. Most likely this is a digital cash grab that will launch to massive early-backer-funded fanfare, but will sink into the abyss of forgotten gacha games, once the devs have made their millions and start looking for a new target. Just like all the others.
Just read some of these insane quotes:
"The game will also have 1,000 farm bots which can mine a token, like a Bitcoin miner. You can buy a loot box, assemble the parts to make a farm bot, and set them loose mining. Or you can just buy a farm bot preassembled at an expensive price.
Then you can mine the currency and provide them to other players in the game, either by giving it away or selling it.
“It’s a way to compensate people who really believe in us in the beginning,” Schiermeyer said. “That’s how we’re structuring the blockchain. The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/10/zynga-cofounder-creates-b...
I mean, I will not at all be surprised if this is, at its core, an ICO-style con. It has blockchain, it has early 'investors' throwing money at it with the promise of exclusivity or scarcity, it's probably designed to reel in people hoping for the next Bitcoin, as if there ever would be one of those now. The main article is full of quotes about the scarcity of resources that will instantly get a lot of gullible people's attention.
This report of someone spending 800k already might well even be part of the scam, the same way any con artist on the street will have stooges pretending to throw in cash in order to convince others that it's legit.
The creators will roll along with the hype for a bit, and then take all that wonderful, liquid cash and ride off into the sunset, leaving everyone else's appendages (and useless digital 'assets') flapping in the breeze.
That's exactly what it is. This sale was to their "partner" company Polyient Games, and they're putting 10 more up for auction next week. This sale was to anchor the price.
>The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
So it's designed with pretty much the worst aspect of long running online games in mind and is pretty much a loot box farming game where you're mining for what is hopefully a chance at building something that might get you what essentially supposed to be a new digital currency?
Sounds pretty awful to be honest.
> “It’s a way to compensate people who really believe in us in the beginning,” Schiermeyer said. “That’s how we’re structuring the blockchain. The people who were first to play it are going to get more than people who are last to play it. So, I mean, there’s definitely a reason to come in.”
So, uh, it's a pyramid scheme, thinly disguised as a game?
Funny, that's what I think of the gaming tables at Las Vegas.
Yet Las Vegas has been doing it for almost a century.
> There is a similar, somewhat-overlapping segment of gamers willing to spend huge amounts of time on a game
These assertions come with a huge asterisk. The game isn't even released yet, which makes the behavior even more aberrant.
> the upcoming fantasy MMORPG game Mirandus
There's nothing leading edge about this. Both western and eastern video game companies have been doing this for more than a decade.
An infamous example is EA, who have been sucking the fun out of their games with this for ages. Bonus points to them for slapping these mechanics on paid games which they sell en-masse by exploiting franchises popular with mass-market consumers, then extracting additional money using the sunk cost fallacy.
https://decrypt.co/52447/the-nine-most-innovative-crypto-art...
$MEME would make Duchamp proud ;)
https://dontbuymeme.com/
I expect the SEC will be all over this once they catch up. It took them long enough to take action against XRP though which is pretty open-and-shut, so this might take a while.