Some good changes here, especially for ships. I like building diversified transport networks with everything the game has to offer, but ships have historically been just too fiddly to be fun. Not having to put down buoys everywhere should make using them much more viable!

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Quoting: LoudTechieOoh I know the answer.
You can just include a piece of data you also include in the drm of the game in the nft and sell it from a developer approved wallet/signing key(means the same in this case).
This way the blockchain itself is the proof as long the first wallet it came from(which by design is tracable in most blockchains) is the approved wallet, the data is the same as the hardcoded value and the current owner has the key of the last wallet we know it's legit. We still have to check if multiple players have the key of the currently holding wallet, but that can simply be achieved that the wallet contains sum too attractive to steal or by embedding some kind of hardware id hash in the transaction.

The blockchain is that monitoring database you talk about. It's inneficient, because for it to be trustworthy thousands of copies of it have to exist. It's big, because it tracks much more than only your ownership. Making changes is intentionally expensive, because otherwise everybody would be doing it, but it's possible.

This is the one thing blockchain can actually do. Assign ownership to a single instance of arbitrary data it can still be copied, but the copy can be recognized as such.

Interesting, thank you! This hypothetical DRM would have to be Internet-connected so it could check the state of the blockchain every time you try to play the game, right? So you can't copy it to an air-gapped machine while you own it, then keep playing after you've sold it?

Quoting: PenglingTimely video about NFT/crypto/Web 3.0-gaming from the excellent Jauwn, who covers these things from the perspective of an actual gamer.

OK, that part about the game that tried to steal and repackage a free open-source game but did it so incompetently that the original game creators were able to push an update that made the rip-off unplayable was hilarious.

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Quoting: tarmo888NFTs enable securely buy/sell your items on secondary markets without an intermediate, the blockchain is just a permissionless distributed database. Steam is against this because they don't want the items traded on secondary markets, they want you be vendor-locked to their platform.

This is where I tend to get lost when I try to connect theory to practice. In theory, it sounds great. In practice…what secondary markets exist between games? If I buy some ultra-deluxe Pokéball in Pokémon: Crypto & Currency edition, I can't exactly use it in Call of Duty, nor can I take a sniper rifle into Stardew Valley. I can certainly imagine horrible cash-grab cross-overs where you buy like a skin in one game and another game allows you to use it there, but that's quite superficial, and merely requires coordination and cooperation between the games involved, not a blockchain per se.

But OK, maybe instead of items in games we could buy and sell games themselves. It certainly sounds like an appealing idea. But how would it actually work? As a permissionless database, everything in it is public, and anything traded on it can be seen by anyone. You could trade some sort of "token" that you now "own" a particular game, but…what does that mean? You still need to download it from somewhere server somewhere in such a way that everyone else on the blockchain can't just download it as well (so you can't have the token include any sort of "key"), which means we're back to some sort of centralized database monitoring who "owns" each game to be able to dole them out (and of course, the games would require some sort of DRM to make sure you couldn't just keep playing them after you've sold them!). And if you have such a centralized database already, you don't need to add a blockchain onto it, you could just have that database (or multiple centralized databases with a hand-off mechanism).

I agree that Valve would like you to stay in their ecosystem for economic reasons, but if Valve and Epic Games suddenly both decided one day that they'd like people to be able to sell games between their platforms they could do it without any blockchain technology.

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Quoting: NezchanI see the Ironclad and the Silent as usual, but I'm not sure about the skeleton. Not sure if the Defect and the Watcher are going to be back, or replaced with entirely new characters this time around.

It's an…odd choice, to my mind. Naïvely, I'd imagine they'd either go with all new characters, or have all the originals + one or more new ones. Not "half the originals, + a new one". One of the screenshots on Steam shows the Ironclad in play with some new cards, but also Ghostly Armor and Shrug It Off looking to be nearly identical to the first game. Maybe they're following the Civilization principle of "⅓ the same, ⅓ improved, and ⅓ new."

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe basic "blockchain" concept is a clever solution which has, ever since, been looking for problems it is actually appropriate to solve and instead finding problems it sucks at dealing with.

It'll be interesting to see; the first laser was also described as "a solution looking for a problem," and then we found lots and lots of problems for which lasers are a really good solution. I'm curious to find out if, in a couple of decades, blockchain technology will be similarly ubiquitous or still looking.

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I was confused because the article says 8 players and the video says 16, so I checked out the Steam page for elucidation:

QuoteWhen playing Free Play mode Super Video Golf can be played either as couch co-op with up to 8 players using 1-4 compatible controllers or the PC keyboard, or online with up to 8 computers connecting to a single game. Super Video Golf can also be played as a combination of both allowing up to 16 players in a single round!

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I remember buying Besiege back when it was in Early Access, back in like 2015. As a child of the 90s, I remember when you got a game on a CD or two, and maybe it got an expansion the next year (or two if you were super-duper lucky), and that was it. None of this surprise-new-expansion-multiple-years-later stuff*. I love this new world we're living in.

*As seen with Noita today as well.

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Interesting! I know of multiple theme park builder games with roller coasters and what-not, but I can't really think of any other water park builders off the top of my head. (I wouldn't be surprised if some exist, but I don't know about them if they do.)

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I've got a few mods for Noita I've been meaning to update for…huh, a few years now. Maybe I should get around to doing that while I wait for mods to get updated for the RimWorld release tomorro…

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Well, nice to see the Merchant is still doing well for himself. No mention of the engine specifically, but presumably this is where they switched from Unity to Godot after the debacle last year. And I hope those "new ways to play" include native co-op multiplayer this time instead of needing mods.

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