LogFAQs > #961631902

Yellow posted...

I think there is a legitimate case in favor of it.

Take Hearthstone, a game where you can buy cards that you don't own and can't trade. If nothing else changed about that game, but the cards were nfts, where you can buy a pack for a constant $5 or whatever and sell them individually, it would be objectively better.

But there's already ample precedent for being able to sell in-game items. Pretty much every multiplayer Valve game that's been active in the last decade allows players to do this, and any remotely popular game that allows trading has an unofficial RMT market. NFT's do nothing to enable this model.

Furthermore, official RMT models tend to make the game *less* enjoyable, rather than more, as publishers design the games around such models for the sake of maximizing the cut they take. Diablo 3 is one of the better-known examples of this: Under the original loot system, the vast, vast majority of gear that dropped was useless for the character you were playing (even more so than most ARPG's), all but forcing players to rely on the RMAH for meaningful upgrades. They could offset the cost of doing so by selling their unwanted stuff, but all of that just translated into the game being made less enjoyable for anyone that didn't make Blizzard a little extra money with all of those extra transactions. Eventually, Blizzard decided they'd exhausted their ability to make money off of the RMAH, so they scrapped it and Loot 2.0 came around and changed the bias to favour players' current character, generally making for a much more enjoyable experience, but the original game definitely suffered for the decision to build it around RMT.

Ultimately, RMT is a variety of microtransaction. If it's officially implemented, you run into all the same issues that are associated with any other kind of official microtransaction, usually involving the game being designed to manipulate players into spending extra money (extra grind, exploiting FOMO, paywalling the interesting cosmetics...). If nothing else changed, addingRMT to a game like Hearthstone that is currently designed to manipulate players into spending publisher-set prices to make the game less grindy would indeed improve the game. The problem, however, is that other things would change. The game would become unbearably grindy for anyone that didn't want to trade, game balance and drop rarity would be manipulated to promote higher-value trades, and Blizzard would overall start basing their game design around what would result in the most trading, rather than what would result in the most playtime (specifically, maximizing exposure to purchase opportunities).

Yellow posted...

The flaw is this, that wouldn't be a system designed for maximizing profit, so it would be abused and the designers would inevitably be selling cards for $10k because a pyramid scheme is one step away.

Squenix's president's comments on the matter make several references to "token-based economies," as well as a couple suggesting systems wherein players can recruit other players to sell stuff for them (literally pyramid schemes). Whatever happens, these economies will be pretty tightly controlled by the publishers for the sake of making them extra money. It's exceedingly unlikely that they'll result in significant benefits for any more than a tiny handful of players that really dedicate themselves to making money off of the game, and even that will be beholden to the publisher's whims because they will always have the ability to make the tokens that comprise the economy worthless.