Justin Kan: Web3 games don’t need to lure players with profit
The whole &quot;play-to-earn&quot; concept isn&#x27;t actually that popular in web3 builder circles, in my experience. The companies that work on that just spend a ton of money on marketing, and Axie&#x27;s valuation went so high for a while, that it keeps getting mainstream attention.<p>I think he&#x27;s totally right, though I don&#x27;t think he does a great job of explaining why blockchain tech can be beneficial for gamers. Here&#x27;s some of my quick thoughts on potential benefits:<p>- Credibly neutral in-game item marketplaces: I think this will take a long time to get any traction, to be honest, because while these marketplaces are super centralized around Steam (Valve) and Epic today, gamers don&#x27;t currently face any major issues with those marketplaces.<p>I think the way this tech takes off is when more marketplaces die because EA decides to start and then kill one, and everyone loses their items they paid money for, because they don&#x27;t have any sovereignty over their purchase. There is already discomfort among gamers about the current world of DRM, where a game can become unusable because the company decides to shut down a server 5-10 years later.<p>- Sustainable game server hosting: on that note, it&#x27;s becoming less common that people are able to host their own servers for multiplayer online games. When you are able to, funding those servers has usually been either donation based, or in the modern day perhaps requiring a Patreon subscription.<p>Tying in the easy value-moving crypto provides, it is possible to make games that make it really easy for players to &quot;pay&quot; for the servers they use, and smart contracts can be used to coordinate incentivizing and compensating people&#x2F;services who run servers for those games, in transparent ways and perhaps using value capture that is built into the game (ie. if you buy a hat, maybe a % automatically goes to a fund that pays out to servers you play on).<p>This could make it possible for game servers to essentially always exist as long as 1 player wants to play it, any time in the future. In other words, we can have the convenience of online games, but with the permanence and resilience of DOOM.<p>- Interoperability of digital items: when people talk about this, they usually talk about being able to use a gun from one game and bring it into another game. I think that&#x27;s suuuuupeerrr far off, if a good idea ever at all.<p>The much more straightforward, and I think cool, idea around this is basically: if your special skins are NFTs, that makes them automatically compatible with any and all apps and protocols that support NFTs out of the box. So you can stake them in an online poker game that supports NFTs, sell them in any NFT marketplace&#x2F;auction house, and sure, bring it to your metaverse house or whatever and keep it in your virtual house.<p>Compute-level interoperability is the most powerful aspect of crypto&#x2F;blockchain, imo.<p>I also think Justin is wrong about not needing blockchain. I agree that in theory, some other solution could provide the right incentives and interfaces to support this ecosystem of composability and interoperability with native value transfer, but I think you&#x27;ll just end up re-inventing something that looks kinda like blockchains we have today.<p>This has also been proven time and time again by new alternative chains that strip off the parts they find &quot;pointless&quot; and expensive, and end up realizing why they need it later.<p>Overall: Headline is correct, in my opinion, and I think a lot if not most of the web3 builder world is on the same page today. I wouldn&#x27;t over-index on the other stuff he said, though.