With the incoming surge of play-to-earn metaverse games, will it kill traditional mmorpg?
traditional mmorpg
pro
-RMT is forbidden
-spend money to be the coolest/strongest in the server
-flex costume/kill record
con
-P2W package
-botter
metaverse game:
pro
-you can cash out your silver legally
-spend money to get money
-flex portofolio
con
-no FTP, maybe
guest star: @Hillgarm
no no no, come out please. Your insight will be very helpful in preparing for the incoming future.
I don’t know about metaverse/play-to-earn games enough to have any idea on how these two will compete. I took a quick crash course on what it is and how it works but that shouldn’t be enough for a proper discussion, all I can do is drop some concerns related to the whole idea.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that this sort of philosophy may be used to create scarcity on demand behind the curtains. If item rarity is an important feature it can also be used to shut down any method to generate a certain item, which ensures players can buy and sell exclusives and get the devs a fat cut. Of course these could be fair and, maybe, tied to the overall player population, but even this metric parameter can fail as it can be artificially inflated (more on that soon™). It’s also concerning on how would direct cash items be traded between two players, it is scenario where devs will always earn less than a direct sale, yet preventing that to happen goes against the pay-to-earn philosophy (and P2P systems aren’t inclusive, which is vital for online games).
Along that, pay-to-earn games and bots are a perfect match. Bots only exist for two reasons, the game demands too much from players for them to work for the rewards and the associated task is too simple and/or repetitive for an average person. They could use IDs and/or phone numbers as validation mechanisms but that can be easily bypassed by taking some elder ID that wouldn’t ever touch that game and buy a new mobile line. Surely, it can be completely busted by increasing the combat complexity, yet that is less friendly for non-dedicated players, which are the ones more likely to buy the rares. It’s just silly to think people won’t ever try to cheat on the system, I’d even dare to say they’d try adapting to any combat system developed to get a real income.
Now on a stingier side… Capitalism. It ain’t proving itself to be as great as people thought it was, specially in the past 2 years, and people think pushing it to the virtual sphere is a good idea. Sure it can help low income people to have some “easier” alternative, but it can be more of a gamble depending on how the system is implemented (if botting were indeed impossible), which makes the real world side just worse (I won’t even get to the idea of having multiple country regulations involved…). It’s sounds crazy to implement a 1:1 version of capitalism right when it’s showing its cracks. If the system eventually fails in the physical world, it will certainly fail in games as well.
In the end, it shouldn’t matter. It’s just like that Reggie quote/meme, “if games aren’t fun, why bother?”. MMOs is a dying genre because it is mostly stagnated since it reached its peak, but we moved from dial internet to streaming. It ignores that everybody on the internet has access to unlimited content across multiple media, be it by free to play games in other genres, youtube, netflix, etc. Games have to offer a valuable experience to players or else they’ll die, even if it isn’t shut down completely. It won’t matter if the game is play-to-earn or not if (or when) it is terminated.
Personally, it looks like a time bomb that isn’t worth engaging (maybe if it gets an amazing game…).
At last, here are two (of many) outcomes to think about that are terrifying.
1 - This kind of philosophy will cause a boom of low quality games with the sole purpose of printing easy money for everybody, which will quickly collapse and bury the idea forever.
2 - Traditional MMOs will stay stagnated and play-to-earn just offer the same, but with the monetary benefits, dealing the final blow to the older variant. Then, the play-to-earn model collapses on its own due physical world implications and/or regulations that prevent it from operating as intended and it kills MMOs for good.
Again, that’s just a bunch of possibilities and issues it may (or not) happen, it can all be bs from an ignorant fool.
I’m only somewhat familiar with the concept of metaverse. Well, honestly, I don’t think it has even been fully actualized. There is only one game that I’m aware of at the moment, which I don’t recall the name of, but I will assume we are talking about the same thing. Where you could buy property or whatever with real money as an investment and get a return from various game functions taking place within that area?
I read about it on the official website a while back… It seemed like a novel idea, and I even considered buying a plot. I have my reservations for these type of concepts, though, for several reasons.
In a philosophical context, it seems analogous to the hypothetical VR world from science fiction - where everyone is logged into some artificial reality and people increasingly cease to function in the real world, spending all of their time in the virtual one. The scenario just seems like nothing good could possibly come from it. People are overly preoccupied with the internet as it is and that is already having negative consequences on our society.
Looking at it in a more practical sense, from an economic perspective, I think it is comparable to crypto… which I don’t trust. Hell, I don’t even like the idea of fiat currency, but at least if you can have paper money it is something tangible. People don’t realize how vulnerable our current system is. We dodged the bullet on Y2K (Thanks, John Titor), but if we have widespread failure of computers / electronics somehow… we’re in serious trouble.
As far as capitalism is concerned, I think most people have a fundamental misunderstanding, where they conflate the problems that have arisen from it with the system itself. Essentially, we are dealing with a dichotomy of a free market that runs itself vs a state run system like you have with Socialism / Communism. It comes down to whether the government is involved and in my experience they need to stay the f*ck out of it. I’d prefer to avoid taking the discussion in a political direction, but the current economic situation, at least in the US, is due to the decisions of the current administration. Obviously, the pandemic disrupted everything on a global scale, but we would have been to recover by now. To put it simply though, the results of Capitalism are dependent on the people involved. It is an open system with a great degree of freedom, so there is an inherent potential for exploitation. The criticisms of Capitalism are more accurately a statement on humanity as a whole. Whatever measures that we take to deal with the problems (because the system is regulated to a certain extent), aren’t effective because don’t actually address the root cause. It may very well be that Capitalism isn’t actually a good solution - it’s just the least bad option - because the controlled route has only lead to tyranny and widescale human suffering.
If there is money to be made, the Metaverse will be subject to the mechinations of the same people that are manipulating the system now. We are seeing this happen now with crypto. I wouldn’t expect a different outcome, because ultimately they are still operating within the greater framework. Any apparatus designed for a financial purpose is susceptible to corruption. In order to escape that influence, you would have to establish an entirely separate system that operates independently. The aforementioned bad guys aren’t going to let this happen. This is the real reason behind many of the military conflicts over the past century - countries not wanting to go along with the petrol-dollar, trying to revert to gold back currency, etc.
I realize this is a rather cynical outlook on an already bleak situation… perhaps even beyond the original scope of the discussion. Nevertheless, an good conversation.
Cheers.
Have you heard of chronicles of elyria, a crowdfunding mmo that hype themself for a play to earn mmo? You see how it end up?
I believe play to earn in actuality is never a concept when the company is the one who pay, why would they need you to farm virtual items? They don’t. They can generate game items, they can sell it, the company don’t need us to play for them, they just need the f2p for the crowd, f2p are the bonus, and the p2w are always their main target because most mmo, games, are business, not some charity, even some free labeled one.
Unless you talk about players trade, it’s always be a thing for game with tradable stuff so it’s not about traditional metaverse whatsoever, but where there’s tradability, there can be marketplace and players can make money out of it
Or if you talk bout game with in game currency that represent money and only source is by purchasing with money and win from others, but it’s rarely an mmo case, like poker example, they must have strict rules on everything especially cashing in if there ever was, and most likely they are gonna be cheap, otherwise they would go bankrupt by fake accounts, botters, hackers etcs
As for company to actually pay players in gamr there’s always a catch, there’s always trade off, but not for playing, not for farming, but something like your personal data, email, account info like password, or having you watch silly ads etcs, sometime you don’t even get paid, the experience you have is the reward they gave you like being a free tester equal to having early access to game which in most case you should’ve paid so in this case it’s win win situation
If they make a game play to paid by company, they don’t make game, they basically make something as big as platform, like youtube for example that having clear concept of money making platform, people making videos, companies pay youtube to show their ads, the ads showed through creator contents, creator got money from promoting ads, both got paid, both got profit.
But play to get paid by the company never really a clear concept because platform can’t simply grow by people doing farming of virtual items or doing in game stuffs and gain credit, no, the company don’t need them both, they don’t need the items, they don’t need you complete game quests, they don’t get paid either.
But play to get paid by others will always exist so long there is players trade and demand. Whether it’s legal or illegal, it’s actually just the company rules which dictates, but players are boundless, and if the company try hard to limiting trade, they will as well kill the feature itself, and it’s always been a gray area for centuries, so it’s always been your choice to make the game play to earn or just free to just-play.
Have you ever heard of ponzi scheme?
Also:
ROFL
so it begins
Tos got so much sh*ts to fix that it won’t happen see the light of nft.
I’m in elon musk club in this one
I said metaverse sucks and inecessary. It’s gonna be a lame reason people didn’t go live irl when they can and instead turn on the screen and attach it to their eyes
As a man who behind pc for work myself and doin extra more during gaming and then phone I can’t lie to myself that stick to screen almost all the time is sickening
Real life is still awesome, probably worse due to pandemic but still, it’s not pixelated or fake, like a fake live show
Unless right now is post apocalyptic era where we can’t really go outside not because damn virus but simply being outside is totally intolerant, metaverse could be an answer
Now, it’s just like a failed steam game released in 2016 with same name
Those guy and highly paid worker on meta are on dire need of progress because fb and Instagram met it’s end patch, no groundbreaking improvement could be made, and they can’t compete with tiktok.