The serious business of making games

The biggest problem is getting a game to recognize that a gun from one game is a gun. How are the animations rigged? Does it even fit the model? How much damage does it do? What ammo does it fire? Is it balanced with the dozens/hundreds/thousands of other guns in my game?

It could work for very simple things. Like you could potentially hang your NFT jpg of a rainbow farting on your wall in Animal Crossing.

But anything that has real gameplay impact? Not a chance.

The issue is that none of the hurdles described above are solved in any way by NFTs. The NFT is mostly just an authentication system – auth can be complicated but it’s a small effort compared to:

  • Reaching a shared legal framework with the NFT provider with business terms and requirements for what is allowed to go into these things (since now an outside party can, for example, introduce symbols into my game that make it illegal in Germany, so I need to offload my liability)
  • Designing and reaching a shared standard agreement between all involved development teams that define what assets are represented by the NFT and how they are incorporated in the games
  • Actually implementing the sanitized pipelines that pull the NFT content into each individual game

Even if that gap is bridged, the NFT itself isn’t a better authentication system than something we host ourselves that we can control, where we’ll have better response times and the ability to make changes to the database in response to fraud.

Finally, if I’m a product manager on a project like this, I’m going to do everything I can to kill this requirement. I don’t want my devs to spend time working on a feature that .01% of players will use, and I don’t want highly vocal crypto users flooding our twitter account with complaints that the aspect ratio is off on their Ape.

Very much this. It would take Sony or Microsoft requiring it to move the needle on major projects. And even then it would be locked into their walled gardens.

There’s just no good reason to spend dev time on NFT integration vs. adding a new feature or simply polishing the game you have.

Yet here are all of the big publishers supporting Stadia…

I must need another cup o tea, because I don’t follow how Stadia supports the idea of integrating NFTs in games.

But also I didn’t know Stadia was even still a thing I’ll admit.

Google paid the publishers absurd amounts of money for the initial batches of AAA ports. They didn’t need to sell well to be good deals for the publishers.

The only reason to implement NFTs for in-game objects is to create a marketable asset. But that’s in no way good for the underlying game. All this stuff about cross-game compatibility is the usual snow-job to try and pretend there is something here other than speculation, fraud and money laundering.

I don’t think this example works at all. First, Discourse users directly benefit by saving a click and not having to open a new tab just to view a small morsel of content. Second, Discourse benefits by keeping users reading on its platform rather than having them wander off to an external site full of distractions to click on. Those are both more direct reasons for Discourse to put in the engineering effort to support them than the game developer would have.

But most importantly, it’s an effort that can be done once and supports all tweets or all YouTube videos because they have a consistent structure that can be relied on. They aren’t trying to take an arbitrary blob of data and put it in a game in a way that meaningfully preserves its essence or the way it works in a totally different game.

Yeah, that’s similar to where I was going with the Monster Rancher analogy. Reduce things to a level of generic abstraction and let each game do what they want with it. You could have an open standard where each token has to have a name, a profile image link, and weights for a few abstract stats, and it would be simple enough as a developer to support that (though why wouldn’t they just want to sell you their own items directly?). But the pitch of a legendary weapon with unique attributes that can be carried with you across games and will function the same in all of them makes no sense.

Yep, this is what happened there. You can’t get big publishers on unproven platforms without hefty sales guarantees – they know the marketing they’re giving to the platform is worth way more than the pittance they’ll likely make in actual sales.

Just a reminder that we have another thread that’s all about NFTs in games: You bought horse armor. You bought loot crates. You’ll buy in-game NFTs.

Blizzard’s workplace culture is jeopardizing their relationship with LEGO:

LEGO’s statement:

We are currently reviewing our partnership with Activision Blizzard, given concerns about the progress being made to address continuing allegations regarding workplace culture, especially the treatment of female colleagues and creating a diverse and inclusive environment. While we complete the review, we will pause the release of a LEGO Overwatch 2 product which was due to go on sale on February 1, 2022.

This would not have occurred to me, but makes sense.

Ken Levine responds, kind of.

While I was driving home today, I heard on NPR that they’re doing a story on this tomorrow (Jan 13th) on All Things Considered. Congrats on the national coverage.

Yes, I heard that little preview too. Hopefully I’ll get to hear the story on my drive home tomorrow.

Hey, thanks! I believe you will get to hear from several of my amazing colleagues!

Ho, congrats!

One to keep an eye on, I hope.

Very cool, although I was hoping it would be a bit longer and more in-depth.

Indeed!

Why work five days a week (or more) when you could work four?

(The Verge mentioned Vodeo in the union context, but may have missed that we also have a four-day work week.)