What’s the problem with — Item Interoperability?

Episode 2: Money for nothing

Welcome to What’s The Problem With?, our regular, irrelevant stress test of the blockchain game sector.

So, blockchain games eh? As we previously considered, they’re not really games, more like a giant Ponzi scheme.

But let’s give the benefit of the doubt to those poor developers trying to come up with something new. And these guys talk a lot — A LOT — about item interoperability.

Admittedly, the concept sounds cool. You buy an item in one game and potentially you can use it in other games.

But ‘potentially’ is the operative word here. Interoperability relies on other developers deciding to spend their time and money supporting someone else’s game or at least their sword, tank or hobgoblin.

Obviously they’re only likely to do that if someone pays them, or they think they can make more money some other way. Or because they’re desperate and their game ain’t great.

Cats in a sack

In fact, that’s exactly what’s happened in the only current example of blockchain item interoperability — CryptoKitties.

Because it’s the biggest (only?) blockchain “game” out there, other developers are now adding mini-games that use kitties into their games, or building entire new games that totally rely on the ownership of a CryptoKitty.

That’s great for CryptoKitties’ developer Dapper Labs, but massively limits the potential for poor sods who now are reliant on another game for their games’ success. Note who’s the driving seat: CryptoKitties isn’t supporting anyone else’s items.

Not to forget the result of what’s being called ‘The KittyVerse’ isn’t ex-cat-ly (see what I did there?), setting the world of blockchain gaming alight.

It includes

• KittyHat, buy a hat for your CryptoKitty
• KittyRacer, bet which CryptoKitty is the fastest
• Crypto Cuddles; a CryptoKitties battle game (WTF!) etc.

Still, let’s pretend at some point in the future, there are a bunch of blockchain games people are playing and which support interoperability. For the sake of example, these are a card-based Hearthstone game, a post-apocalyptic shooter, and a space trading game.

The problem here is items in the card game will be very specifically honed RPG-style characters, while the shooter’s items will be weapons, and the space game’s items giant spaceships.

Of course, it would be possible for the Goo General card to become a Goo Rocket Launcher or a Goo Space Battle Cruiser in the other games, but would this make any sense in terms of its underlying Goo-ness?

Better games?

Hence, the issue here isn’t the technical ability to share items between blockchain games but how to share item context in a way that doesn’t totally destroy the game world illusion or even the gameplay balance.

No doubt plenty of developers will attempt to crowbar interoperability into their games, but the overarching question will be will it ever make sense from a game point of view to share items?

Or will it actually improve any games to share items?

Because if not, interoperability will be just another example of blockchain game developers doing something because the blockchain enables it, not because it makes their games better.