this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024

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Ubisoft is still trying to make NFTs happen (www.gamedeveloper.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You don't need NFTs or block chain for any of that.

unique items with serial numbers
record of ownership for items
transaction history of who bought/ sold the item
currency to pay for items
account balances
all that tied to some external reference to a blob of data that represents the thing being traded

Sure, you don’t need blockchain and NFTs to do all that but once you invented that system you’d have effectively reinvented blockchain and NFTSs.

The meta-problem here is two fold:

For reasons I don’t comprehend, a lot of folks have been fooled by central banking propaganda that “crypto bad; me no like crypto bros”. Alan Greenspan, or whoever is modern equivalent is, ain’t yer buddy. And neither is the PR firm his friend hired to program y’all’s brains via Reddit posts from hundreds of deep socket puppet accounts.
Involved video gamers (as opposed to people who merely play video games) from my experience, more than a typical person, tend to angrily seek scapegoats for I’m-not-sure-what. Therefore, a successful profitable and enduring enterprise like Ubisoft is one of their favorite targets of ire. So like any angry mob, whatever Ubisoft is doing then they hate it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

unique items with serial numbers

record of ownership for items

transaction history of who bought/ sold the item

account balances

All of that is pretty trivial to do in a standard postgres database.

currency to pay for items

I've never worked on currency stuff, but my understanding is this is a well understood and developed problem space. No one is blocked on software development because they can't figure out how to charge a credit card, or implement their own stupid "Microsoft Points" system

all that tied to some external reference to a blob of data that represents the thing being traded

I don't really understand what you mean by this. Maybe this is a load bearing point of yours?

Sounds like an API layer on top of the DB, though, which is also pretty trivial. Like Gw2Efficiency uses the GW2 api to read the items you have on your account.

For reasons I don’t comprehend, a lot of folks have been fooled by central banking propaganda that “crypto bad; me no like crypto bros”. Alan Greenspan, or whoever is modern equivalent is, ain’t yer buddy. And neither is the PR firm his friend hired to program y’all’s brains via Reddit posts from hundreds of deep socket puppet accounts.

I think it is an error and deeply presumptuous to make that kind of claim about the other people in an argument. How would you feel if I said you were fooled by crypto propaganda? Not likely to change your mind or even have a amicable conversation. Especially if you add the insulting "me no like" phrasing.

There are many reasons to reject NFTs and cryptocurrency that do not stem from being "programmed".

Involved video gamers (as opposed to people who merely play video games) from my experience, more than a typical person, tend to angrily seek scapegoats for I’m-not-sure-what. Therefore, a successful profitable and enduring enterprise like Ubisoft is one of their favorite targets of ire. So like any angry mob, whatever Ubisoft is doing then they hate it.

People of any sort are susceptible to believing what their group believes. I don't think "gamers" are more suspectible to this, but they may be louder in spaces like lemmy.

But, to your point, I don't think people would focus their ire on Ubisoft if they were like "You know what? We decided to let our workers unionize, and we're getting rid of microtransactions." I mean, maybe. I don't know. There are certain groups that if they told me the sky was blue and there was free ice cream, I'd still be suspicious.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I get that you are insulted by my comment about crypto critics, but a few of your comments have shown that you lack the understanding of crypto to criticize it. Thus, you have validated my comment you found insulting.

I listed a series of bullet points & you said Postgres can do that. Of course you can define those tables in any database. But the logic to perform operations on those tables for a transaction and accounting system must still be written. One of the main aspects of blockchains are exactly such an API.

Second, you have shown that you don’t understand NFTs either. But thank you for at least admitting that you don’t understand what I meant by refs to blobs of data. So there is hope. Almost no crypto currency stores NFTs on-chain. Blockchains are designed to be super efficient since they are distributed transaction systems. When you buy an NFT, the actual data for compromising the NFT itself is stored somewhere else. The blockchain just has the token proving ownership.

But the meta-problem is more important here. You are debating so confidently and asserting things so boldly, yet you don’t have the knowledge of the topic that a 2 hour tutorial would give you. That is the real problem. Why are people like this? Why do they read something that is essential an editorial and then go around vehemently repeating the points from that editorial?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Thus, you have validated my comment you found insulting.

I don't think insults are going to benefit anyone.

But the logic to perform operations on those tables for a transaction and accounting system must still be written. One of the main aspects of blockchains are exactly such an API.

Transactions are one of the most basic things databases do. Audit trails are also extremely common. Have you done any development that uses a relational database? Nothing you're describing is difficult or uncommon.

When you buy an NFT, the actual data for compromising the NFT itself is stored somewhere else. The blockchain just has the token proving ownership.

I don't see how this is a plus or unique. A typical row in a standard table would be like pk, item_id, owner_id, etc. Foreign keys are extremely common.

You are debating so confidently and asserting things so boldly, yet you don’t have the knowledge of the topic that a 2 hour tutorial would give you. That is the real problem

I mean, maybe, but I'm really not getting the impression from you that you know how existing technology works. I've been a software developer for more than a decade so I've got that going for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

bro, just point at Valve, they did all of that without stupid NFTs almost 20 years ago with CS and TF2, all of that, without blockchain and shit, the algument of NFT being descentralized is okaysh, but claiming that you can't do that without NFT, or no one ever did is plain wrong

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So you’re a developer. Beautiful. That makes it easy then.

Look, you mentioned Postgres. But why use it at all for anything? Because redoing all the features that separate product provides is a giant pain in the ass. Now, what if your needs didn’t quite work with trad-relational DBs? Too much data, reads a million times higher than writes, no need for real-time accuracy. Then you use a specialized db like BigTable.

There are other services you plug into instead of reinvent. You stand up web servers with special features like redirect rules as configuration. You could write your own web service every time you start a new app, but that’s crazy. The need Apache or whatever is filling is a communications management piece.

Ok. Now. You are building a service and you need to build a transaction system for trading of digital assets with fiat currency. You could write your own or you could use a specialized service. NFTs on crypto currency are that prebuilt service. I’m switching metaphors now, but it’s just like picking a Docker provider.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Look, you mentioned Postgres. But why use it at all for anything?

It's a good tool for the job. It's well tested, supported, documented, etc

I really don't see the value that NFTs and block chain offer for games (or much else). I don't want to store my game data on some block chain. That's going to be slow and awkward. A quick Google says etherium can handle like 10 transactions a second. Bitcoin takes like 10 minutes. That's unacceptably slow.

So it's more like switching from postgres to an Excel sheet.