I'm not going to get into nfts much here because the market and how crypto work has sure made them have one of the worst reputations ever out there. I'm also not going to talk much about companies behind nfts or tokenization of ingame assets because starting off the wrong way feels like it's going to be difficult to pivot when your main interest are shareholders of the company. I'm also not going to talk about the gaming industry currently where it's all about how to make the most amount of money from their players rather than giving them a product they value and enjoy playing.
I'm also not going to try and convince you that gaming needs to make you money, the way people go about this almost always makes the projects unsustainable and the open markets cause these big swings where for a short while everyone's "thriving" with their greed leading the charge of their gameplay and then there's 5 years of game of thrones winter where most gamers disappear.
I'm just going to name a few examples of where I think in gaming it would've been nice to have something to show for having spent a lot of time there, even if all that time was spent for the fun of it, for the friends you've made, for the trends you've chased, for the accomplishments, achievements, status you may have had, etc.
I've personally played a lot of world of warcraft, on and off as of late but quite on in its golden days. With every new expansion came the big "reset", all the gear you've worked hard to get was now unusable, your effort and acomplishments before the reset vanished. WoW did do "something" to not make it all seem lost, you could still use mounts you've found before and eventually you could use older item sets' looks to make it look like that's what you're wearing even though you really had the newer gear. There was some effort as to not making it all feel like a waste, but it's all still kind of worthless in the end, isn't it?
By worthless I mean valueless, and I understand that many would counter me here saying it's all about the memories, etc, but why does it have to always be all about that? Why do players always have to be the ones who play and pay and get nothing back? Without its players, WoW would've been nothing. They're the ones who carried it forward. Yet when the games shine and are doing well, it's only a few people who become multi-millionaires/billionaires and its shareholders who mainly work as another layer on top of the market capitalization. They're just feeding off of the success of the players and developers + workers.
If you were a player who started playing from its early days, shouldn't you have some value to show for it if you stayed "invested" for so long?
Instead, players are met with strict rules. Don't share your account. Don't sell gold for real money. Don't sell items for real money. You can't trade this item, you can't trade that one. If you want to quit, just quit and desert your account with nothing to salvage for all the hours you've spent.
Why is it so?
Why can't you sell your account to someone who wants to have the items you've amassed over the years if you're moving on. Why create such a "sink" that ultimately takes everything from the players?
This is kind of the question I've been asking for many years now and what I'd like to do different with Holozing.
I understand there's difficulties with certain aspects of this, anti-money laundering, KYC, country-based rules, etc, and while I'm glad these are being worked on to make it easier for blockchain start-ups over time, it's not like it's always up to us creators and developers to be in charge of what's happening in an economy that isn't in our control. Sure we do what we can in terms of not letting underaged kids spend too much money on buying lootboxes, or attempting to make the game a softcore casino for players, but beyond that you can't place absolute limitations on a game economy just because of a few bad actors. They'll be everywhere, as we may have seen in the early days of bitcoin and even here on Hive from time to time.
Restrictions in terms of safety of our users are important, to make sure assets don't get stolen, etc, but that security comes with the underlying blockchain; hive. Your keys, your crypto + assets.
Either way, without going too much off-topic.
I understand that users here on Hive may already be familiar with some of these concepts as many/most of you do earn some crypto for your activity here and I'm sure same goes for your @splinterlands activity for instance. To many outside however, are not aware that these thigns are possible at all and the only way they can profit off of blockchain economies in their minds is to put up money up front to purchase something to then sell it to someone for a higher price.
Naturally that's one part of trading and markets, but I wanna make sure that if the game does well and becomes popular, everyone involved who's helped get it developed in one way or another gets to do well financially to a degree along with it.
Look at Pokemon as an example, it's one of the biggest franchises and outside of being a content creator or a collector, there is close to no value going to the players and fans.
Why not?
Can we change that?
I hope so.
If you've spent a lot of time and effort while having fun in a game and its ecosystem, you should be able to get something back when you decide to retire that game. At the same time, games shouldn't just randomly end and destroy all the perceived value within it (shoud-out to Stop Killing Games), if you instead choose to pass your accounts down a generation. How much that is is of course dependant on a lot of variables but something will always be better than nothing, it should become the norm in this industry in the future.