This is an interesting technical challenge, basically a decentralized Neptune’s Pride with a public (but encrypted) gamestate.
Reading about their development it doesn’t persuade me from my “maybe there’s a business justification, but there’s no technical justification” position. They have to do so much extra work to ensure a player’s move can’t be deciphered by other players, and I don’t think they’ve solved the problem of player activity – it looks like you can tell how many moves a particular player is making, which is still a considerable amount of information in a game like this even if you can’t see the moves themselves.
Also this line from their blog is interesting:
So this isn’t even entirely decentralized. Which makes sense – to make money off of any blockchain game, wouldn’t the dev team need to “sell” positions in new games and take a percentage of the stakes?
And that brings me to the business justifications – mainly, skirting regional gambling regulations. It looks like they eventually want each “planet” in the game to be worth a certain amount of money which goes to the winner of the game. You could do this with a game developed with a typical centralized structure but I’d guess this method affords the game some regulatory confusion – plus it avoids needing to explain your game to Mastercard, or have a server that the government can shut down.
Other business benefit might be ease in getting funding, since you have a lot of newly affluent crypto holders that have an interest in seeing products that use the currency.
I’m not familiar at all with games being built on Ethereum - is this a fair summary, and are other projects going in this direction?
Yeah, it does seem interesting, but it also illustrates the whole “blockchain just makes things slower and more complicated with no real gain for end users except financial speculation” point. It also seems to have huge problems with scalability, like a lot of crypto projects.
Also, I hadn’t even thought of this:
A game where you have to pay to take your next move sounds pretty dystopian to me.
I don’t think “upgrade contracts” means they it’s not decentralized… it means that they may need to change the code in the contract that is written to the blockchain in order to fix bugs/problems with how the game plays. What that would do is basically kill any games using the old contract until such time as an addendum contract is put into place to upgrade those old games and the gamestate as it was created by the old contract to the newer gamestate/contract code. I’ve seen this happen a number of times with different blockchain marketplaces when vulnerabilities were found in contracts that allowed wallet access or for assets to be stolen, etc.
This is the plus and minus behind “smart contracts.” As long as your contract adheres to the standards (this is just an Ethereum example – other chains have their own contract structure), it can do any variety of things. Some people write sloppy contracts, some people write brilliant ones. The code in the contracts determine what is written to the blockchain. So, if a game like the aforementioned one finds a vulnerability in the way they save state to the blockchain, they have to issue a new contract. Ideally, the new contract automatically knows how to update data that was written with the old contract.
Maybe this is a basic question, but if my smart contracts are open source, how do I stop other developers from copying it and running other versions of my game?
What’s to stop a large firm, like a Zynga of the Blockchain, from duping the code from smaller outfits and then using their enormous marketing power to outcompete them?
To be fair, verbosity is somewhat of a plus to prevent “too clever”/obscure code. But I would expect a platform to have better libraries if it’s changing the world.
Copyright prevents copies of any code unless otherwise permitted (simplifying a little bit). Just because you can look at the contract code doesn’t mean it’s Open Source™.
Thing is, the smart contract is really not the interesting or complicated part of a game, and you probably wouldn’t mind someone copied it to popularize whatever concept you’re doing. It’s still not going to allow anyone to transact tokens they don’t “own”.
In other words, the only person they could find who had bought an Ubisoft NFT was someone with a financial interest in promoting game tokens on the Ubisoft-administered blockchain; might as well have been an Ubisoft PR guy.
I get that code is covered by copyright but having parts of your platform hidden at least serves as a speed bump for groups that are trying to reverse engineer it. With the game linked above, most of the novel things they’re doing would be exposed, right?
Also, I feel like whenever I dig deep enough into a libertarian project I find parts that require government enforcement again.
I could be wrong – haven’t written smart contracts – but I suspect that the idea is that the contract should contain pretty much everything needed to execute the code, library wise, so that it doesn’t fail from some missing dependency.
We expect companies to handle NFTs, and keep them in games going forward, and they cannot even keep music licensing deals figured out for re-releases within a decade of release.
I mean, I get the dream and ideal of NFT’s being some sort of way for internet creators to own and profit off of their digital art.
But, I don’t think that the current implementations of NFTs and US copyright law actually allow for that. Right now, systems other than NFTs can accomplish the goals set out by a lot of these projects. There hasn’t been a good enough explanation as to why this needs to be decentralized on the blockchain.
Right now, NFTs are so chock full of get rich quick pyramid scheme esque creations and theft and mismanagement, it seems laughable to try to get mass adoption of this. Sure, I can earn my AR-15 #1535 , in a ubisoft game… but why does that ownership need to be decentralized if it will only be able to be used in that game, or possibly future ubisoft projects.
Also, in the context of this Voiceverse thing, it seems it isn’t the creator that supposedly owns their art. It’s the gamer who buys the NFT. The creator gets royalties but supposedly no further rights, though it’s not 100% clear how they reconcile that with the NFT owner supposedly owning “all the IP”.
It’s also, again, very dystopian. It would be one thing for them to use this in some sort of “democratic” way, so everyone with a token offered at a reasonable price gets to use the voice, but it sounds like once again the highest bidder gets all the fun.
And you can only own the NFT you want if you can afford to pay more than everyone else in the world.
Final edit: What they describe in the Twitter thread is not much like what they describe in the roadmap on the website.
In other words, you’re not getting a specific character voice, you’re getting some random AI voice. The roadmap goes on to describe (not yet implemented?) stages at which people can mint their own voices, which is presumably how you would get to speak like Troy Baker (speaking as a specific character?). Hell, it’s not even clear from the roadmap if you can even just use it as a voice modulator at this point, it seems like the first stage is text-to-speech, which I’m sure is going to make for great Youtube videos, let alone in-game communication.
I will give them some credit. At least they’re actually doing something productive with the concept, unlikely 99.99% of other NFTs, or indeed crypto tokens in general. No obvious reason why it has to be an NFT, but whatevs.
It’s disappointing to see Troy Baker associated with this. The entire voice acting profession is living in fear of being replaced by Siri-style voice synthesis right now. Why is a guy who can doubtless book more gigs than there are hours in the day leading the charge to put his fellow actors, and eventually himself, out of business? (I know, I know: a giant pile of money.)
The good news is that this is tied to NFTs, so as we’ve seen there’s sure to be (looks at responses to Baker’s tweet) make that is a giant backlash.
