NFTs and Elite

[Frankymole]

You say that, but Team17 very recently announced NFT plans for Worms, then quickly backtracked after a massive public backlash.

Worms publisher Team17 announces, promptly cancels NFT project following backlash

‘We will not be working with them on further titles,’ Aggro Crab Games says

www.polygon.com

What was that huge furore about loot boxes a couple of years back? Was it on some Star Wars game, can't remember. I didn't really get the fuss at the time. After all, most games are pay-to-win, even on Roblox...

 

[xzanfr]

you paint with quite a wide brush. it's like prats who claim they think miners don't deserve to live like some loons on this forum have said.....

I mine.... but I use my gaming pc to do it, I don't expect to make billions but it covers my gaming hobby .... but I have solar and a home battery. in summer I am still a net producer of electricity and in winter I need the only waste which comes from mining .... heat ..anyway...
I am certain some of the holier than tho people happy to say they don't think I am worth the air that I breathe have at least as large a carbon footprint that I have. possibly bigger.

regarding houses. as a country we are pretty good on renewable energy but our houses are really poorly insulated. I get it for old buildings but there really is no excuse for new builds. this needs government intervention to force the issues. houses CAN be built carbon neutral,.arguably even carbon negative. I don't understand why all new houses do not have to have solar and a home battery. going forward it will make an excellent use for old electric car batteries.

if solar was built into new houses it would not cost much and would even mean fewer tiles needed if done properly

Unfortunately the government are leant on by their developer friends so any measures are watered down to the point of being useless, or loopholes created that are exploited by the big builders. (e.g. big developers owning warehouses full of inefficient boilers to fit in their new homes when manufacturing them is finally ceased). Even my useless local MP is campaigning for fracking and the pollution of the rivers to line his friends pockets.

Individuals would rather import a tap or tonnes of stone from thousands of miles away than lose floor space by having 50mm thicker walls for better insulation.

Everything has a carbon footprint so we can't escape it just reduce all the needless stuff, but greed overtakes everything.

Ultimately we're the ones who are going to have to justify our actions to our kids / grandkids when they ask why everything is f-ked.

 

[Jmanis]

What was that huge furore about loot boxes a couple of years back? Was it on some Star Wars game, can't remember. I didn't really get the fuss at the time. After all, most games are pay-to-win, even on Roblox...

Sounds like the perception was that the powerful upgrades you could get through them essentially made the game pay-to-win, to do a quick google around that?

Frankly, when it comes to loot boxes, pay-to-win is the least of the problems. Instead, given their chance-based nature, there's plenty of links identified now between loot crates and problem gambling... it's not seen as gambling in the traditional sense, since you're not "winning" money, you're just purchasing a digital "thing" which has random digital "things" in it... kinda like if you buy some Party Mix and really love black cats, but you only get two in the pack instead of 6.

But there's plenty of cases now of people getting into real world debt because of loot boxes, and worse, it's basically gambling targeting groups including children, which is very problematic for lots of jurisdictions.

But that's getting a bit off topic.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

What was that huge furore about loot boxes a couple of years back? Was it on some Star Wars game, can't remember. I didn't really get the fuss at the time. After all, most games are pay-to-win, even on Roblox...

Roblox is a free to play game. battlefront 2 was a £50 pay to play game. I have different expectations from games I can play for free Vs ones that cost significant cost up front.

not sure how old you are (not meant patronisongly sorry if it sounds that way) but back in the day cosmetics were tools used to encourage players to play games for longer.... for me I could happily play games just to earn a tough to get costume for a character. lootboxes take that away.
the absolute worst however are ones which objectively improve your character. game.balance and progression is a very fine line, as soon as lootboxes to skip that progression and just buy special gear.in. the temptation is to artificially drag that time to earn in-game out more and thus encourage lootbox purchases... and that is assuming they don't go full P2W when you can ONLY earn via cash

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

Not a big fan of these things so I'd be against them being added to the game.

 

[RetroPaladin]

Hell nah

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

@Morbad
Well, that is your choice.
Be happy you still have one.

 

[Morbad]

@Morbad
Well, that is your choice.
Be happy you still have one.

I'm not sure what choice I'm supposed to be happy about having here.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

I'm not sure what choice I'm supposed to be happy about having here.

Of course not, but i'm sure you'll work it out eventually as things inevitably change.

 

[Morbad]

Of course not, but i'm sure you'll work it out eventually as things inevitably change.

If the game no longer entertains, I'll stop playing. That's the only meaningful choice I've ever had regarding it, and there is nothing that is going to change that.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

If the game no longer entertains, I'll stop playing. That's the only meaningful choice I've ever had regarding it, and there is nothing that is going to change that.

Pretty much like every other player.
Seems reasonable.
But, be careful what you wish for.

 

[Guyperson]

difficult to hide the provenance or prevent/revoke the transfer of BTC, for example

Unless it's the major stakeholders getting scammed, then it's suddenly not so difficult anymore and the problem goes away with a hard fork.

 

[Morbad]

Unless it's the major stakeholders getting scammed, then it's suddenly not so difficult anymore and the problem goes away with a hard fork.

This would effectively be a 51% attack.

No entity is large enough for that to be a likely scenario for BTC today. Even something like the unplanned Ethereum fork in 2016--resulting from the decision to reverse the DAO hack--isn't likely to be repeatable. These blockchains aren't as decentralized as they should be, but they aren't anywhere near centralized enough for any single entity to arbitrarily direct their course.

Edit, an elaboration with regard to BTC:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w29396.pdf

Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses and Bitcoin distribution

Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses. Bitcoin distribution.

bitinfocharts.com

Mining is phenomenally concentrated, due to the specialized equipment required, but we still have an estimated 55-60 entities controlling half of mining hash rate. The overlap between miners and the largest wallets is not strong as miners tend not to hoard what they mine. The largest BTC wallet is a cold storage wallet for a large exchange that has 1.33% of all BTC in it. No other wallet reaches one percent and the odds of multiple whale-sized wallets being compromised simultaneously is extremely far fetched.

No one entity, or any likely alliance of entities, has the power to unilaterally declare a competing BTC fork. Anyone can fork BTC, but for there to be any confusion or argument about which chain to follow, it would need to be a near even split. A scenario in which any BTC stake holder was able to convince the sixty largest miners to screw themselves and the rest of the network over to reverse some transaction or scam is virtually inconceivable. Even if the requisite centralization did exist, throwing away a trillion-plus dollars worth of assets trying to chase a few billion makes zero sense. It would take a wealthy nation-state, willing to ruin itself, to do something like this.

 

[Morbad]

You do not get to tell me what to do.

There are neither instructions, requests, nor commands in my post.

Simply speculation that being on your ignore list would spare me seeing an alert that linked to nonsense.

BTW, I actually did ask FD to delete my forum account.

They never replied. I did exactly as what I was told to do, to begin this process by none other than @Paul_Crowther, and I would still like my account removed, truth be told.

But if they can't be bothered to do this, well, I won't be quitting here either.

I do have a suggestion though: If you don't want to be here, don't.

 

[metatheurgist]

Sid Meier warns the games industry about monetisation

The creator of Civilization speaks to the BBC on the 30th anniversary of its release.

www.bbc.com

 

[sandkid]

I apologize for a very delayed reply...life happened...

Gracious, this has been a fascinating thread. I'm still perusing it to determine if I ask any additional questions, but for now:

THANK YOU. No, really. It's a touchy topic (in gaming as much as anwhere else, I'm sure) and I appreciate all inputs on that topic. Personally, what I understood (and now understand a little better) is that they didn't really create much value for the developer or consumer (player). Somebody early mentioned you can effectively do what NFTs 'should be valuable for' without actually using them in the first place, such as generating a market (in-game with or without real currencies) for 'products' in the game. CS-GO and skins being an example of this (itself a contentious topic).

I personally don't support deep monetization of a game beyond its sale price / microtransactions to support 'free' titles. Developers deserve to be paid and I have faith in the market to determine when a price is too high or too low (hence why I rarely bough stuff with ARX when I played...)

I've noticed lately deep monetization in Ubisoft titles and it's rather annoying if not downright frustrating. I don't play games to be bombarded with more marketing. My wife and I like to see the movies in theaters...lately, at our local Cinemark, before the trailers roll there's a minute or so long Ad for...Cinemark? "Where else can you enjoy the movies but here!?" or something like that.

But...I am here? Why are you marketing to me who has already purchased a ticket? I just want to see my movie.

I worry gaming as a whole industry is steadily descending into that hole: let's sell a game that is really just an introduction to more products we can sell you. It's quite demoralizing to see things turn that route. Elite hasn't (and I don't think it will?) but with how the news has been across the industry, I was curious to your thoughts and explanations.

Again, thank you!

 

[sandkid]

Ultimately, tokenized game assets are just a way for a publisher to capitalize on NFT hype. The purpose of an NFT on a decentralized blockchain is completely undermined if there is still a central authority (the game publisher) that can arbitrarily honor, reject, or limit the use or transfer of the token, and you can damn well bet that any terms in the game's license agreement, and the NFT itself, are worded to provide unlimited liberty for the publisher and as little as possible for the NFT holder.

So, "how" is the wrong question. It's a technical one that can be answered by putting "what is an NFT" into a search engine and applying some deductive reasoning. "Why?" is the more relevant question, and the answer is, thus far, to scam customers out of stuff that was either free, or beyond the purview of the publisher, before.



I disagree with this, generally speaking.

Blockchains, as immutable, distributed ledgers of transactions, do something that has never been done before. Applications for that technology like cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and even NFTs, also do things that are impractical to do otherwise (it's thus far impossible to counterfeit, and simultaneously difficult to hide the provenance or prevent/revoke the transfer of BTC, for example. Another is a smart contract that will automatically be fullfilled upon certain conditions being met, without requiring any third party mediation or intermediary), but are generally still in an immature state where speculative investments are the predominant activity.

Sure you can technically make an NFT of anything and try to sell it, but even if the vast and overwhelming majority of NFTs and cryptocurrencies out there are either utterly senseless wastes of blockspace or scams, that doesn't imply that such uses are the only uses.



This pretty much sums up my opinion on intellectual property in general.

For NFTs this is exacerbated even further as there hasn't been sufficient legal challenge or precedent to determine precisely under which circumstances terms set down in the contract that create an NFT are going to be enforced or upon what content it can be enforced. The recent judgement on the inability to copyright AI created art essentially invalidated a huge swath of NFTs in the US, for example...because people were taking AI generated permutations of one original piece and selling each as a discrete NFT. You can still buy that NFT, but such ownership is moot if no one is going to honor it, because the market value of intellectual property is wholly dependent on being able to excluded others from it's use.

Most early NFTs will be as forgotten as the blockchain allows them to be and there will be a lot of tears in the process, but the hype will eventually die down, people will start using the content of correctly formatted NFTs in legal disputes where they will be the deciding factor, and they will find a legitimate utilitarian niche. I have no idea how long this will take, or what blockchains will dominate the market in the long term, but I'm fairly confident they're here to stay.

I appreciate this particular reply - especially at the start: Not how, why. Thanks!

The trouble with a search engine (and a problem that will only steadily worsen) is that everything on the internet is 100% true. Jokes aside, my rudimentary understanding was undermined by the fact most articles on NFTs deal in artwork - which @Ian Doncaster spoke about at length (Thanks!) - and I was having trouble applying that to a game like Elite...beyond skins and the like.

But you are correct, I suppose my question really was why would FDev consider it (hypothetically, again I don't think they are for many of the reasons explained here).

 

[Erei]

But you are correct, I suppose my question really was why would FDev consider it (hypothetically, again I don't think they are for many of the reasons explained here).

Money. That's literally the only reason to get interested in it as a company.
The sucker I mean, customer, might be lured by the appeal of feeling unique by owning an item with a unique number on it, for a videogame item. For many customers, it's also the idea of speculating, like the company. You buy the item and resell it later on when, supposedly, it increased in value.


There was an example that was cancelled at the last moment about NFT and games. It was in rainbow siege I think ? A ubi game. They planned to make a cash shop helmet (appearance), which was also a NFT. Each helmet had a unique number on it (visible but kinda small).
The idea was to have a unique item, which you could resell later on when its value increased due to artificial scarcity (it would never be "printed" again).

It was cancelled days before release, due to massive community backlash, but you get an idea. So, in ED that'd mean some unique paintjob with a unique number on it for example.

 

[Frankymole]

Aren't the Cobra Mk IVs similar, in that only certain Kickstart CMDRs can ever own them? Though they can't be sold on, the "kudos" or status symbol effect is there.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Aren't the Cobra Mk IVs similar, in that only certain Kickstart CMDRs can ever own them? Though they can't be sold on, the "kudos" or status symbol effect is there.

That's kind of the thing, though. Devs can easily create artificial scarcity to drive up the value and/or make people panic buy.