They are

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

Thing is, none of those advantages are real either, compared to a public database and API. Steam’s inventory API already maintains items beyond the lifetime of games, AND you can use items across other games. You can’t manipulate the Inventory of other games but I bet if there was demand (there isn’t) this could be implemented easily.

Collectibles are non-fungible tokens by definition, and blockchain is just a data structure.

I don’t care about collectibles / NFTs, but this is nothing new in the gaming world.

There was an abstract conceptual theory of system agnostic game add-ons. It isn’t… completely inconceivable.

You could work with a relatively prolific engine, like Unreal, and set up a standard character model dummy with designated hard points for attaching accessories and certain default movements. Then any accessory could simply scale to the environment - Master Chef could swing a keyblade while the Elden Ring guy gets to wear Iron Man armor, because these are all “human” models with well-defined structures that could map to the associated equipment. The blockchain becomes a universal registry for these assets that a platform can read from to render the art.

The problem is that nobody ever actually implemented this universal protocol. They all just ran off making jpegs of weird animals and running fake auctions to create the illusion of a secondary market. You had zetabytes of data being processed so some Baked Alaskahole could claim his Kumming Koala was worth $40M.

I don’t even strictly begrudge “the blockchain” as an idea for licensing and data storage (just please don’t ask me to think about who is generating the licenses or storing the data). But it was all vaporware. None of it was anywhere close to being created, much less delivered. People were throwing billions with a b of dollars at entirely empty promises.

In theory it makes it possible for other games to use the same items to make stuff in their games (I doubt this in practice)

I’ve heard this before, but there’s literally nothing preventing games from setting up some shared items on their own without NFTs. Nobody does it because companies want to keep their IP, and worrying about external items would be a nightmare to balance.

NFTs solve like 1% of the problem of sharing items. So much more goes into making them actually work. For example: NFT id 5551337 is owned by the player: now what? How do you figure out what 3d model to render? What actions can you perform? How does it integrate with other systems? All of that is going to have to be custom for every game involved on a per-item basis.

But why honor other companies tokens? Hell why honor your old tokens? You make the effort to create assets in your new game, are you going to just give it to a limited number of players who play both game for free, or resell it to all players? If you buy an nft for a game that then gets ignored, was it any different then a DLC, or using the steam market place to trade the item? After all i have read i don’t see where this helps players at all, and for companies, the only benefit i can see is if they pump and dump their players.

It’s all too common when anti-phrenology people don’t understand phreno101.

Then please, enlighten us!

What is a game that brands itself as a web3 game (not a game that just uses blockchain tech but specifically calls itself web3) that isn’t also play to earn.

I would say it’s worse than that. Like knowing that you are selling exp boosters changes the calculus on how exp is earned. If the game played smoothly, there would be no need to sell the boosters and creating the eco system to support it would have been wasted. A system where certain items are nft based would push for these items to be better then the non nft items both for expectation of value, and to raise the trade value to siphon from. This already happens with games with dlc cosmetics. The gear in the games looks increasingly shit compared to the DLC. And that is a natural consequence of polluting the game space.

From what ive understood itll be opt-out. (Except for on the sui)