[bpeebles]

It's just as easy for a game developer to say "eh we're no longer using that blockchain for game assets" or otherwise make your "purchase" (which isn't really a purchase) unusable with a blockchain based solution as it is with current Steam/iOS-based systems. (Probably easier, really.)

[zmgsabst]

Absolutely easier:

Steam and Apple stores have policies that merchants are legally liable for, including refund and availability policies.

Who enforces it when the creator no longer honors your token?

[mpeg]

You're missing the point, the game developer obviously has to buy into the ecosystem, but the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.

Web3 is a pretty good use case for this, and the transaction costs barely add anything if you compare to the cut the platform takes (Apple takes 30%) so the game publisher could easily swallow this extra cost too (which could be tiny)

[Nursie]

They'll never be owned by the customers. They're owned by the companies that design them. Other developers do not have the right to include your purchase in their games due to law, not technical problems.

Further, you're now talking about having a way to bring your level 28 sword of whacking into a completely different game world. And somehow you think this is just a matter of an in-app purchase.

It's a weird fever dream.

[bentcorner]

This feels like a tiny tiny edge case. How many developers simultaneously have the rights to an IP and have the game asset data and code, but also lack the ability to retrieve purchase data on that other game?

[cecilpl2]

> the difference is with the current status quo in-app purchases are not really owned by the customers, so even if another game developer wanted to honour their purchases there is no way to interop.

Roblox already does this. Your in-game purchases are yours and you can carry them from one game to another.

Platforms outcompete protocols - this is why web2 became centralized.

[rglullis]

It's not about "game assets". It's a about having disintermediated access to the state of the "world".

Think of all the stories of startups that offer a product that locks their users and then go to be acquired/shut down by some other bigger company. If the services and the data live on the blockchain, it's guaranteed by design that the users are in control of their own data (no lock in) and that if the company just drops out of the market, others can continue using the services however they want.

[wollsmoth]

This doesn't make any sense to me. The blockchain just says you own a thing, it might even have some data about the thing. But what are you going to do with it? If the game company decides to shut down their game, what do you actually do with a digital hat you bought on the blockchain?

Oh, yeah, maybe someone else will make another game and do the work to support a digital hat you bought from someone else. Maybe it'll happen in a bid to try to scoop up users of a dead game. Or maybe, they'll just make their own digital hats and sell you a new one.

[DanHulton]

All of these games run on centralized servers, though. You can "own" whatever assets you want on the blockchain, when that server goes down, they stop having any use at all.

[the_gastropod]

Many apps offer you your data if you want it. For example, Facebook. I think people overestimate how useful data is outside of the application that was tailor-made to handle the data in the precise format it's in.

I guess "Web3" (it pains me to even use that term) would allow another developer to reverse-engineer an application to digest the data as it exists on the blockchain, but... that seems like a pretty negligible improvement over the status quo with many very significant drawbacks. For starters, a Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude better performance than the "Ethereum World Computer". To make that concession, I'd hope for a much better benefit.

[kristjansson]

Great! I have 132GB of photos, and would like to store them on the blockchain to ensure I always have access to them. How much will that cost me? Show your work, and round your answer to the nearest million.

Maybe too much snark, but there’s a real tension there. “Store it on the blockchain” means “store a copy on every single node, forever”. It’s understandable that incurs some costs, and that one has to store only the most essential information. Maybe, there are some paths forward, like sharded chains?

[candiddevmike]

I don't think blockchain is the answer for this. The answer is self-hosting and requiring SaaS companies to offer a self-hosted version.