2022 台北遊戲開發者論壇 Taipei Game Developers Forum（TGDF）
Official Website: https://2022.tgdf.tw/en/
Speaker: Lars A. Doucet / Co-Founder, Level Up Labs
Title: Cutting through the hype of Blockchain Gaming
Blockchain games are experiencing massive hype and investment. But is there any substance there? Axie infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, Splinterlands, and more all present themselves as a fundamentally new approach to game design. Unfortunately, they are troubled at every level -- economic, technological, and social, as I will demonstrate by drawing on quantitative evidence as well as the 30-year history of precedent from other online games. If there is a future for Blockchain gaming, it will need to fundamentally rethink its approach.
I assume the audience has a basic understanding of the following concepts:
- Blockchain
- Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- Basic economics
The audience will learn about the fundamental instability of "play-to-earn" schemes, the fundamental difficulty of balancing economies and also making a fun game at the same time, the ways virtual housing crises mirror the real world housing crisis, and how to move past fundamentally broken paradigms in order to build truly decentralized games.
Q&A:
Q1: Do you think cryptocurrencies will become the mainstream payment method for gaming?
A1: No, I really don’t. There may be a possibility for them to be used as a minority payment system, but a lot of UX works remains before even that possibility.
Q2: What do you think about "digital asset ownership"? Even if we don't use "blockchain" technology, I think it's the major problem we need to care about. My "digital asset ownership" means that they can be cross games and won't disappear when companies drop games. I think NFT is just a way to do that.
A2: I’m very skeptical of this position, the fundamental issue is the oracle problem. All you “own” is a record on a blockchain, the thing it points to — the actual digital embodiment of the asset — is only yours by trust and can be changed or revoked anytime. Only a fully in chain game (like dark forest) can begin to deliver on this promise and even then major challenges remain. As for cross game assets I’m skeptical as well. There’s little incentive for companies to honor goods issued by someone else, so there’s economic issues before one even gets to the technical issues, which are themselves enormous.
Q3: What if we make a Traditional game to let players play-for-fun or play-for-win but with a blockchain trading system as infrastructure to let people easily transfer or retain the value of the game. Do you think it might be one of the future GameFi could be?
A3: The challenge is that any game with tradeable assets becomes very difficult to balance. The minute assets came be freely traded between players everything about the game becomes fundamentally different from a “traditional “ game. You have to design for the economic rules you have allowed.
Official Website: https://2022.tgdf.tw/en/
Speaker: Lars A. Doucet / Co-Founder, Level Up Labs
Title: Cutting through the hype of Blockchain Gaming
Blockchain games are experiencing massive hype and investment. But is there any substance there? Axie infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, Splinterlands, and more all present themselves as a fundamentally new approach to game design. Unfortunately, they are troubled at every level -- economic, technological, and social, as I will demonstrate by drawing on quantitative evidence as well as the 30-year history of precedent from other online games. If there is a future for Blockchain gaming, it will need to fundamentally rethink its approach.
I assume the audience has a basic understanding of the following concepts:
- Blockchain
- Massively Multiplayer Online Games
- Basic economics
The audience will learn about the fundamental instability of "play-to-earn" schemes, the fundamental difficulty of balancing economies and also making a fun game at the same time, the ways virtual housing crises mirror the real world housing crisis, and how to move past fundamentally broken paradigms in order to build truly decentralized games.
Q&A:
Q1: Do you think cryptocurrencies will become the mainstream payment method for gaming?
A1: No, I really don’t. There may be a possibility for them to be used as a minority payment system, but a lot of UX works remains before even that possibility.
Q2: What do you think about "digital asset ownership"? Even if we don't use "blockchain" technology, I think it's the major problem we need to care about. My "digital asset ownership" means that they can be cross games and won't disappear when companies drop games. I think NFT is just a way to do that.
A2: I’m very skeptical of this position, the fundamental issue is the oracle problem. All you “own” is a record on a blockchain, the thing it points to — the actual digital embodiment of the asset — is only yours by trust and can be changed or revoked anytime. Only a fully in chain game (like dark forest) can begin to deliver on this promise and even then major challenges remain. As for cross game assets I’m skeptical as well. There’s little incentive for companies to honor goods issued by someone else, so there’s economic issues before one even gets to the technical issues, which are themselves enormous.
Q3: What if we make a Traditional game to let players play-for-fun or play-for-win but with a blockchain trading system as infrastructure to let people easily transfer or retain the value of the game. Do you think it might be one of the future GameFi could be?
A3: The challenge is that any game with tradeable assets becomes very difficult to balance. The minute assets came be freely traded between players everything about the game becomes fundamentally different from a “traditional “ game. You have to design for the economic rules you have allowed.
