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Nexon Will Create MapleStory Universe, With Blockchain and NFTs, With MapleStory N Coming First
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Member UncommonPosts: 12,599
Post edited by StevenWeber on
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All just a rash of shit, if I'm being vitriolic about it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
First, who said they were going to be priced in ethereum. Any company worth anything working in blockchain right now isn't going to work natively with ethereum, it's not smart at all.
And despite being "down another 6% today" it's still up over 1K% from early 2021. multiply that by several thousand more from back in 2017. Crypto isn't immune to a global market downturn, so of course we're going to see a lot of prices crater.
But that's not really the point anyways. What happens when the value of the blockchain used crashes?
Generally, items correct and are cheaper. In the grand scheme of things, what would happen is gamers would take a "loss" on the items they've purchased for higher amounts, or new players are selling at prices akin to what the market reflects.
You have to think about this in terms of "who benefits". In general, there isn't necessarily a negative benefit. The developers will still take a transaction percentage off everything that is being sold. As we've learned with other similar games, it's not going to stop any main monetization channels, this is just an additional model that they profit from, so there's a high chance that even if things are trading at a loss for players, the developers are still profiting wildly.
If you as a player bought an item for 10.00s from another player, go to resell it when the market craters for 1.00, the developers will still garner 2.00s and 20 cents respectively if they're taking a 20% transaction fee. Since the developers are likely spending .000000001% to mint on a network like polygon, IMX or solana, there's a lot of room for these items to tank where they're still profitable.
And most importantly, NFT items revolve around utility, so as long as those items have a use at all, and a player wants the items traded or requires the items as a feature sink, and they want to continue playing the game, the utility will feed the pricing structure more than the market will, due to necessity and scarcity.
If they were smart they would work it within the game and make it seamless. I think the whole premise of comprehensive whitepapers are simply to cover their asses when regulations come down the pipe.
The maplestory video in the article is actually kind of interesting. Basically to summarize it, they plan to make all of the features we have yet to see materialize in blockchain a reality, like cross platform tokens. Of course a lot of blockchain games say this, but this is nexon here. They are a pretty big company. I can't imagine they would say it if they couldn't deliver multi-universal tokens.
Anyways, we can only guess how it will all turn out. I think the market is turning in such a way that companies are starting to realize they can't just rest on saying they have blockchain anymore, while providing the bare minimum of what would be considered a "game". They're going to have to make the games fun if they ever hope to get a solid economy to work.
You have beaten me and Torval for the vitriol, have a loot box.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
Maple story has a fan base so they are going to get screwed... joyful times to be a player.
If you're going to do that, then I am coining Scamware.
Even so, it's happening. When I made the post above, Ethereum was trading at over $1800. Now, it's below $1250. Part of the drop is specific to Ethereum, as its move to proof of stake got delayed yet again.
But part isn't. Tron's USDD "algorithmic stablecoin" has lost its peg and is trading at around $0.99--and has been there for half a day now. If it's genuinely going to be stable, that's an easy arbitrage opportunity to buy it for less than $1 and sell at $1 when it snaps back. So far, that hasn't happened, and nearly all other cryptocurrencies besides the stablecoins are dropping sharply.
But what I raised above was a serious point, even if I was unclear about it. Do people think about the value of NFTs in terms of dollars or in terms of Ethereum? If the price of Ethereum drops by 90%, will that mean that the value of the NFTs will drop by 90%? Or will that mean that the NFT is worth ten times as much Ethereum as before?
For NFTs that people are buying purely for speculation, I think it will be the former. Speculation on all of the different crypto-assets is highly correlated. When Ethereum and Bitcoin get wiped out, all the other crypto-assets whose only value is speculative will go with it. For NFTs that have value because they're linked to in-game items that people are willing to pay for, it might well be the latter.
Firstly, Ethereum will probably trend lower. Some people believe that the floor will hit somewhere around 650 dollars over the next few months. The thing is, the price fluctuations affect a lot, but generally not the underlying dApps that run on it. That means that ethereum as a whole will drop in price, and it will make some aspects of it less profitable and appealing, but utility based products will still fundamentally be profitable.
That's the main issue with the premise that ethereum and bitcoin would somehow disappear if their values crashed. Bitcoin was always meant as a value store currency, but you have to take into consideration where these currencies started from, hundreths of cents. A fall to 1.00 on bitcoin might seem catastrophic, but it wouldn't kill the currency outright, and it wouldn't destroy the utility of dApps on ethereum just because the price crashed. In many ways it could even swing ethereum in favor of more competitive pricing against more traditional applications.
In that way, the genie is already out of the bottle. However blockchain is utilized, whether decentralized, centralized or through some kind of hybrid network structure, too many companies and governments have bought into it to abandon the technology, so as a technology it's here to stay, and it's highly unlikely we'll see games give up on it unless they are forced to do so.
As for algorithmic stablecoins, we already learned with Tether that when you're not properly backing your assets, you really can't keep things stable. Tether is far more popular than USDD, and it lost its peg weeks ago. It has since regained its peg to the USD. By comparison USDC has never truly lost its peg, though just about all stable coins can fluctuate about 2 cents.
Now as for gaming
NFT's are a speculative commodity outside of gaming, inside of gaming, even when we're talking cosmetic only cash shops, they are a limited commodity, with actual utility. Here's the thing though, price is dictated by the markets, but in gaming this is only partially correct. In some cases, the developers put values on their items, while in other cases the market specifically dictates the price.
Here's an example.
In blankos they sell figures directly to players. that means if you buy a figure for 15 dollars, you're not buying it based on the market price of the speculative price of the figure, it's a price set by the developers. Conceivably, you know how much that figure is worth, and you know that blankos will take a % fee when you sell it, so if you want to break even, you know the bare minimum, and you can factor that in as a perceived "bottom dollar". What you paid in that situation is the market price based on USD.
Now in a game like Axie, everything is based around fluctuating costs, and prices are very closely related to ethereum. Sure, you need to have two axies to create one new one, but buying and selling an axie and the costs associated are complicated, because AXS and SLP are both variable tokens, some of which are trading insanely low.
That means that axies are stupid cheap. They don't hold their value, players are selling them for 3 dollars or less. Before it would cost somewhere like 600 or 700 dollars to get your 3 starter axies, now it's less than 10 dollars (not counting the gas fees).
I mean, part of it is also because axie is an awful game, and nobody realistically would play it if they weren't making money. With SLP at pennies or near fractions of pennies, nobody is earning any money. That's the main reason why it doesn't matter that the axies have utility, because nobody wants to play a shitty game. Without a market rebound or some new gameplay aspects, the game is pretty much toast. Sad to say, or... maybe not so sad...it'll be the same with most of these gambling-style auto battlers.
Anyways, the point is... we're approaching the era of correction territory. The market collapse isn't going to end blockchain games or the use of blockchains at all, but it's going to hopefully put an end to the half-assed idle battlers and speculative investors. We're going to probably see a lot of cooling on the markets and doomsayers, but I think this is a good thing for those of us that wanted to see the tech take off without the unrealistic expectation that it's going to make everyone rich.
With blockchain. And hookers.
in fact, forget Maplestory.
Almost as good as walking into a casino and putting the 401K on Black.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I be eating colours when my days are grey
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