My initial foray into blockchain gaming was, as with most people, on the Ethereum-based Cryptokitties.
I don’t quite remember when I signed up but I do remember feeling annoyed that I’d just run out of ETH and couldn’t play without extra funds.
Derp.
After a brief rummage through my exchange account (and after selling off some of my weirder altcoins), I had enough ETH to buy my first kitty. Ten minutes or so later, my kitties gave birth to a very ugly baby kitty.
Shortly after closing the game for the first and last time, I realised something: it sucked. There was barely anything to do and I was a few dollars shorter than when I had started. In exchange for my ETH I had been given three pointless pictures of ugly cats, which I now completely owned.
The next game I tried was called Relentless, a Hearthstone reskin built by Loom on Ethereum. It was jittery and poorly put together, though not altogether a bad game. But what purpose did blockchain play in its design?
Well, you get to own the cards so when that ultra mega rare card drops, it belongs to you forever and can be sold for a huge profit. The game is F2P and features a marketplace for trading rare drops.
On the splashpage for Steem Monsters they talk about provable scarcity, asset ownership and verifiability as being the selling points of a trading card game on blockchain.
Unfortunately, I don’t really care if I own the unique DNA of a particular Cryptokitty instead of just the illusion of ownership. I don’t worry about rare drops being stolen because with any game, that’s just not an issue.
Steem Monsters makes it out as if their tech protects the player from malicious devs who will use their powers to grief you or give themselves all the best cards, to which I say: why the hell would I be playing a game built by such people?
Not even EA are bad enough to steal directly from its users.
The fact is, paying a fee to engage with a game each and every time is an awful idea, unless you’re gambling, in which case it's a different beast entirely. But these games can barely be considered gambling because the funding needed to get anywhere is enormous; no one gets the rare robot kitties without considerable time and investment.
Some of these games feel like elaborate, high-commission currency exchanges designed to make you feel like you’re playing a game, when in reality you’re paying someone for the privilege to mate two of your cats together.
In all fairness, these complaints are somewhat pre-emptive. Blockchain economies require real value to fuel them, so any games built on top of them must be monetised in some fashion (or, you know, we could just purchase the game in a single transaction and skip the ardour of unending extra fees, just like normal games do now. Mostly).
"Mostly."
It’s still early days and a next-gen MMO built on Ethereum is a long way off, so its unfair to bash Cryptokitties for not being the next Neopets. Plus, there are some interesting projects out there (such as The SixDragons MMO built on Enjin). But I don’t see the appeal in playing a game just because it has the word blockchain listed as a feature.