Paid content in videogames (DLC, loot boxes, passes, currencies, "surprise mechanics" and - new! - pay more or wait!)

Trelliz wrote:Stalker 2 getting in on the NFT bullshit train

"Considering the global trends in gaming, we can do more than just offer an immersive game experience," GSC Game World CEO Evgeniy Grygorovych said. "Our players can get a deeper presence in the game, and we will give them this opportunity by presenting the first AAA game with a unique meta experience."

In a wide-ranging New Year's open letter, Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda...is unreservedly enthusiastic about the idea that "token economies" will provide those who 'play to contribute' with an explicit incentive beyond "such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit."

Green Gecko wrote:...I'm not sure even a site like GRcade is possible in a future built on NFTs...

Green Gecko wrote:One largercoin for every post. For every 100 largercoin an opportunity to purchase someone else's post with a displayed cryptographic certificate of ownership.

Tomous wrote:I understand the digital art NFT bollocks to an extent but what's the tl:dr on how it will work in gaming? I can't get my head round it.

Tomous wrote:I understand the digital art NFT bollocks to an extent but what's the tl:dr on how it will work in gaming? I can't get my head round it.

There are endless possibilities for how NFTs can be used in the gaming world to allow for the ownership and transferability of digital assets. Companies such as Riot Games and Epic Games have disrupted the industry by offering games for free, and first-person shooter and online battle-arena games have grown exponentially popular as a result. Alongside those free games, “skins” — typically visual enhancements, outfits or weapons that can personalize gaming avatars — have also become more popular, and users commonly pay a premium for these types of customizations. This is one reason why gaming company Roblox has become so successful; its platform allows so many ways for users to customize and style their identities in-game.

Even more mind-blowing is the fact that users are spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on skins that provide absolutely no improvement to the gameplay itself, only serving to enhance the appearance of a game, character or avatar. Skins have essentially become digital art for video games, and NFTs could allow digital artists who may later want to sell such designs to claim ownership of and authenticate their skins.

There are other gaming applications for NFTs, too. Take Warcraft or Minecraft: Both games allow users to create their own gaming world or map, and they provide endless tools to help gamers leverage their creativity and build elaborate, unique worlds. But what if gamers could sell their proprietary map or world — and their authorship or rights to it — to someone else? NFTs could help make this possible.

Along with ownership of such designs, another challenge with video games is that all the digital accessories, skins, maps and worlds created within a specific ecosystem or platform are “locked” into that game. That means if a 13-year-old is spending all of her or his allowance on customizations for one game, all of that is lost if the game goes away in its entirety.

But NFTs can facilitate the transferability of skins and other accessories between different games. For example, what if a Souvenir Dragon Lore AWP sniper rifle (valued at $26,000 in real American dollars thanks to its rare drop rate) in the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive could be imported into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare?

Or what if that rare turtle or bacon Minecraft cape could be transferred to Roblox’s Adopt Me! game? If players are able to get more use out of the skins and accessories they buy for one game, more gamers might shell out money for such customizations.

Leyline, a not-for-profit company looking to gamify environmental and social sustainability, is working on developing collectible NFTs that people can earn by doing good social deeds that have a positive impact on the environment and their community.

“We are seeing companies move from the box model, to a free-to-play, and now a play-to-earn,” Jeremy Dela Rosa, founder and CEO of Leyline, told me in an interview. “The market is transitioning from a competitive approach to a more collaborative one."

As more use cases like this crop up, we expect that it is only a matter of time before gaming companies begin to adopt a centralized marketplace and blockchain to allow users to freely create and transfer digital goods.

Non-Fungible Tokens ("NFTs") may soon change the video game industry, as they provide easy access for players’ unique virtual goods in digital worlds. Collecting has always been a great passion for people in the ‘real’ world. In contrast, digital collectibles haven’t yet caught up with the broader market.

Many digital goods used to be hard to own because they were not ‘exclusive’ in a physical sense, meaning they weren’t unique and were too easy to reproduce. Blockchain technology as a distributed ledger system may be the answer as it fosters a degree of trust in digital goods. Virtual in-game items can therefore be transported on individual, ‘non-replaceable’ NFTs on an immutable blockchain. This means that they cannot be deleted unilaterally, changed or withdrawn by their creator – NFTs can guarantee a certain ownership to the players. The market may recognise an individual value in these NFTs that players can potentially obtain by simply playing video games. Such a development comes with several Intellectual Property issues which the video games industry will have to face in the near future.

Goodbye analogue baseball cards – hello multifunctional NFT

NFTs are more than just digital equivalents to analogue collecting cards. As digital goods they can change over time and have multiple functions. The versatility for the benefit of their owners has triggered some excitement as NFTs may be used as a passport, as an avatar, to show one’s individual fandom or to simply profit from any special abilities of NFT-items in video games. NFTs can also acquire a market value and even increase it over time. A ‘magical sword’ in a game like Legend of Zelda provided as an NFT can improve its properties over time through continued use, become a rare collectible and potentially even change its appearance (e.g. different colours). Such unique items can create a more individual gaming experience and increase the quality of video games. In contrast, analogue trading cards are static, cannot improve and even lose value when you wear them out through playing.

The industry is also considering certain cross-game uses of NFTs. The existence of the NFTs would then no longer depend on one game. Players could continue to use their acquired NFTs in other games. Players could transfer their unique shovels of Minecraft into their favourite games on Roblox. In this way, games may become independent, as the NFTs from an original game have an individual impact on the story and gameplay of other games.

Nevertheless, NFTs in video games are still in their infancy. In terms of numbers (player numbers and sales), NFT-games don’t yet compete with big video game series such as Call of Duty or FIFA. In the future, however, more complex NFT games may emerge and NFTs may find their way into existing blockbuster games. For example, the company ‘WAX’, a blockchain-infrastructure-service-provider, is teaming up with established rightsholders in the gaming industry. As an example, WAX is creating NFTs for unique axes in World of Warcraft or for new skins in the game Fortnite and both rightsholders and WAX benefit from every trade of these NFTs cards. Furthermore, the players get unique items with a value of their own which improve gaming experience and allow them to profit from wider functionality of their in-game items.

‘Play-to-earn’ as a new business model

NFTs in video games allow players to monetize their time (‘play to earn’). This development may become a logical continuation of the popular free-to-play-games. The concept of these free-to-play games is offering users enough value in-game to keep them playing for as long as possible. Players are encouraged to make in-app purchases to enhance their gaming experience and to fund the development of these games. However, players do not receive ownable digital assets in return for their invested time and money. Plus, developers have full control over in-app purchased items and could therefore change or even delete them at their discretion.

This may change with NFTs in video games. In NFT-based games, players obtain unique NFTs as digital assets for fulfilling in-game objectives. These NFTs gain value due to blockchain based transactions. The transfer of NFTs is executed via smart contracts which automatically send these NFTs to the players when they have passed a certain level in a specific time or met other conditions. Since the data in a blockchain cannot be changed, there is no chance for third parties to undo or simply disregard any such smart contract. Therefore, NFTs represent rare and unique items which may evolve into an asset for which many people would be willing to pay considerable sums of money. Their value can even grow, if the NFTs are linked to real life experiences. For example, in offline e-sports tournaments with a physically present audience, players could use NFTs as equipment for their characters (e. g. a special skin) and the blockchain could store this usage throughout the tournament. If the player subsequently sells his or her used NFT items, the audience will be willing to pay a lot for an item used by a World Series winner. It is not surprising that even e-commerce platforms like eBay now allow buying and selling of NFTs.

Tomous wrote:I understand the digital art NFT bollocks to an extent but what's the tl:dr on how it will work in gaming? I can't get my head round it.

OrangeRKN wrote:The tl;dr is it doesn't actually change much. The prospect of being able to resell skins or whatever is pretty nice I suppose, a bit like trading in a game when you're done with it, but obviously the publishers jumping on the trend aren't doing so to lose money by creating a pre-owned market for digital content.

OrangeRKN wrote:

Tomous wrote:I understand the digital art NFT bollocks to an extent but what's the tl:dr on how it will work in gaming? I can't get my head round it.

As I understand things:

Currently if you buy a skin in a game, a record of that goes into the database on the game's servers. When the servers go offline, or the publisher goes bust, or whatever, your skin goes too.

Instead of using their own database, selling a skin as an NFT means the record of your ownership goes on a distributed ledger - distributed in that it exists and is kept up to date between many computers, and a ledger in that its one long ever growing record of transactions. If the game's servers go offline, or the publisher goes bust, or whatever, the record of you buying some skin still exists. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but theoretically some other game could look at that record on that digital ledger, because it is public, and then add the same skin in their own game, so now you can use it there as well.

Basically it's digital amiibo, but rather than a physical object that you own by virtue of possession, it's a digital record you own by virtue of it being recorded in a distributed ledger. Like an amiibo, that ownership also means you can resell it to someone else. Also like amiibo, it's a fad. Unlike amiibo, you can't put it on your shelf - but you can look up your record in the distributed ledger and be satisfied that everyone agrees you own it, if that's what floats your boat, and provided everyone is using the same distributed ledger and not some different one, of which many exist.

The tl;dr is it doesn't actually change much. The prospect of being able to resell skins or whatever is pretty nice I suppose, a bit like trading in a game when you're done with it, but obviously the publishers jumping on the trend aren't doing so to lose money by creating a pre-owned market for digital content.