Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Blockchain could be proof of work (i.e. Bitcoin), proof of stake (Ethereum), or perhaps something different entirely. You could even use proof of an account with a central authority if you want.
Blockchain doesn’t really care what the “proof” is, only that it is agreed upon by the rest in the chain.
So if you tie the proof to something like ownership of a key to the game (i.e. a potentially valid use of NFTs, which is rare), then the Blockchain would merely state that 50+% of the owners of a copy of the game agree that the transaction is legit. You could potentially tie it to membership in a server instance instead, so if the main servers go down, you just fork the Blockchain to your instance and you’re off to the races. And so on.
There are a ton of ways to make it useful, but I highly doubt big game companies will go through the effort when they can just stuff a cheap crypto fork in the game and claim they have Blockchain. But that doesn’t mean the tech is useless, it’s just unlikely to be used properly in a gaming context, at least with the current state of the gaming industry.
The thing is that the word “blockchain” leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths after all the pyramid schemes and scams, and false advertising by silicon valley companies using the word to get investments. There’s nothing actually wrong with blockchain technology and it has real usecases, but I do understand why people are sceptical. It’s sad really, bitcoin was never meant to be an investment platform.
Precisely.
The worst part is that anything decentralized gets coopted by crypto bros. For example, I want to make a lemmy-compatible, distributed service, as in instead of federated instances, you’d donate some of your storage to use the service and a few people would set up gateways to connect people. But pretty much every time I try to look up documentation, it’s all about cryptocurrencies. What I want is:
I think it’s completely feasible, but I got tired of sifting through all the cryptocurrency nonsense. There are plenty of hard problems to solve (i.e. what does moderation look like if everything is immutable? What about illegal content?), but the easy stuff is unnecessarily difficult because of the weird association it all has to cryptocurrencies.
This is why we can’t have nice things…
Bitcoin was designed to gain value over time by making minting more bitcoins increasingly expensive. I don’t think speculation was the intended use, but widespread adoption would be strangled anyway by making holding onto the bitcoin more profitable than most things you could buy with it.