Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s co-CEO, comments in a new statement that there is no point in implementing blockchain technology if it doesn’t make games ‘fun’.
There are a few ways to do it. As one mentioned, trading of in-game assets. Additionally, some games want to become “Play to Earn”. Essentially the more you play their game, the more buttcoin (made-up coin to use for this conversation) you earn which then you can trade somewhere for real money. It’s like when you play CSGO for years and end up with 350 dollars in steam from selling all those free cases they just give you at the end of a match so you end up buying a steam deck for essentially free… So going back to blockchain, essentially, actions in a game can get you more or less coins. Like you are playing a buttcoin miner.
So I’ve seen a few storefronts try to implement this for all games in their store. That way if you play a game, you earn buttcoin, take that buttcoin to buy a new game.
Utsumi is right though. Buttcoin implementations will not make a game more or less boring. It’s an economy system implementation and most people don’t find the economy as a fun thing.
Those play to earn games, unless there is some weird magical source of outside revenues, are all convoluted ponzi schemes, though. The only money coming in is from new players (it takes hundreds or more dollars to join Axie Infinity, for example). You can earn real money while the game is growing, but as soon as growth stops, the whole system collapses
It’s not really a ponzi scheme when it comes to cryptocoin because they just keep minting more. They are literally printing money. So they don’t need a source of money. This isn’t me advocating for such games at all though. They are usually trash. I can see a world where something like WoW’s gold system is tied to a cryptocoin and thus the money you earn in WoW gains more direct real-world value. Of course, it’s something like 0.00001 of a US dollar but it’s something.
They aren’t saying crypto is a ponzi scheme, they’re saying play to earn is a ponzi scheme. Saying pay to earn isn’t a ponzi scheme because more money is minted is like saying a ponzi scheme isn’t a ponzi scheme because the fed prints more money. Ponzi schemes are a business model where the majority of revenue comes from sign-up fees and investments, the economy they exist within is irrelevant.
That being said a lot of cryptobros seem to want to use crypto as a ponzi scheme so it’s easy to see where people get that impression. Pump and dump can be framed as one - the initial investment is people buying the crypto or dedicating resources to mining it giving the illusion of increasing value, then the people with the most crypto (top of the pyramid) “dump”, causing the model to collapse and extracting surplus value from people’s investment. This isn’t inherent to crypto more than any financial system though, it’s a side effect of the economy being small enough that individual actors can cause a total market collapse and people treating it as an investment rather than a currency (possibly promoted by crypto being deflationary?)