My Non-Fungible Token Rant
Dear Blockchain Games,
You raised $200k-$1m in pre-sales selling your turbo ultrarare robot suits and ships. I don’t know if your ship is worth $200 that I bought. You told me it is — or actually, someone else who bought it at $198 before me said it was.
If your website ever goes down, sure your blockchain assets “still always live on”. But they have absolutely zero use. Say I’m a Intergalactic Blockchain player and a CryptoKitties player. If Intergalactic Blockchain would cease to exist, I can’t use my spaceship in CryptoKitties. There’s no use for it.
If we are to go about this blockchain NFT thing the right way, we need a way to decentralize the creation of NFTs so digital assets are valuable from one platform to another. After all, blockchain allows for permissionless development.
Ethereum is a good start. Ethereum is valuable between different games because it’s seen as a store of value. But your spaceship is not valuable to me in CryptoKitties. Give me the ability to decompose my spaceship for Ethereum for less than the market price of that spaceship (psst… you can make money on this). This way, after I’m done playing your game, or should I say working to make money, I can move on to better games.
“We believe the early adopters will be good players, and they would get all the cool items anyway, so why make them grind? The game will be more fun when it starts not from a clean state, but with some people already owning stuff.” — ETH.TOWN
What the? Because this makes a ton of sense. This is like saying: “We believe those who gives us money should be rewarded with ultrahax so they can make money as well. Why make them work to make money?”
It’s supposed to be a game. You’re not changing the world. You’re not curing cancer. Your supercruiser is definitely not worth 3ETH. If you keep thinking your items have some value to it before the game is released, it’s probably a security (great article by Allen Hsu).
If your blockchain game can run without blockchain — do it without blockchain. You’re never going to get any players just by selling your best power at pre-sale. We’ve seen it before with ICOs. Look how many are abandoned now. We’re not going to make blockchain mainstream if your dApps will focus on fundraising before utility/gameplay.
Non-Fungible Tokens are super powerful, but you’re going about it wrong. Blockchain allows for permissionless development. Start integrating, cooperating, and building with each other.
Sincerely,
-a gamer interested in crypto
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