Category: games

Valve could have easily used the Steam Deck to lock players into its own ecosystem. It could have opted not to include a desktop mode and withheld instructions on how to lift its read-only restrictions. It could have discouraged users from installing different operating systems and made its recovery tools unavailable to the public. Console makers have long insisted that such restrictions are necessary for the good of their platforms. In 2020, for instance, Microsoft argued that because console makers sell their hardware at or below cost to create a market for their software, they shouldn’t have to accommodate third-party app stores or sideloading.

Similar arguments have spilled out into the broader mobile app business as well. In response to a lawsuit from Epic Games, Apple has claimed that its investments in the App Store wouldn’t be feasible if it couldn’t force developers to use its in-app purchase mechanisms. Some defenders of Apple’s viewpoint, such as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, have argued that iOS is more like a game console than a PC platform. So, it’s all the more remarkable that Valve ignored all this hand-wringing and made the Steam Deck a haven for tinkerers. Instead of trying to shut out competitors, the company is betting that its own store will prevail on quality. If the Steam Deck successful — as it appears to be so far — it could upend years of conventional wisdom around walled gardens and become a threat to other consoles in more ways than one.

Bloomberg pays a visit to the NFT-based game Axie Infinity with a 39-year-old player who’s spent $40,000 there since last August — back when you could actually triple your money in a week. (“I was actually hoping that it could become my full-time job,” he says.)

The reason this is possible — or at least it seemed possible for a few weird months last year — is that Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well….

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

If you think the entire internet should be rebuilt around the blockchain — the vision now referred to as web3 — Axie provided a useful example of what this looked like in practice. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an Axie investor, predicted that 90% of the gaming market would be play-to-earn within five years. Gabby Dizon, head of crypto gaming startup Yield Guild Games, describes Axie as a way to create an “investor mindset” among new populations, who would go on to participate in the crypto economy in other ways. In a livestreamed discussion about play-to-earn gaming and crypto on March 2, former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang called web3 “an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition” and “the biggest weapon against poverty that we have.”

By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

The article does credit the company for building its own blockchain (Ronin) to provide cheaper and faster NFT transactions. “Purists might have taken issue with the decision to abandon the core blockchain precept of decentralization, but on the other hand, the game actually worked.”

But the article also chronicles a fast succession of highs and lows:

“In Axie’s biggest market, the Philippines, the average daily earnings from May to October 2021 for all but the lowest-ranked players were above minimum wage, according to the gaming research and consulting firm Naavik.”

Axie raised $150 million to reimburse victims of the breach and repair its infrastructure. “But nearly two months later the systems compromised during the hack still weren’t up and running, and the executives were vague about when everything would be repaired. (A company spokesperson said on June 3 that this could happen by midmonth, pending the results of an external audit….): Days after the breach it launched Axie: Origin, a new alternate version with better graphics/gameplay — and without a cryptocurrency element. About 75% of the 39-year-old gamer’s co-players have “largely” stopped playing the game. “But at least one was sufficiently seduced by Axie’s potential to take a significant loan to buy AXS tokens, which he saw as a way to hedge against inflation of the Argentine peso. The local currency has indeed lost value since he took out the loan, but not nearly as much as AXS.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Parker Lewis for sharing the article

What the vast upshift in resolution can’t hide is the fact that GTA V is a game originally designed for consoles that are now two generations out of date. The character models and facial details look positively archaic compared with, say, Horizon Forbidden West, and the building architecture too seems almost quaint in its stylised blockiness. Compare it with 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and you can see just how far Rockstar has come in its building of intricate next-gen worlds. In many ways, however, the design of the world itself has not been been bettered in the decade since it arrived. The size of San Andreas, the sheer variety of landscapes and the diversity of actions and activities is still incredible — Cyberpunk 2077 may look better, but it doesn’t let you play golf or tennis, or go on day trips on a bike, or set up incredibly complex car or helicopter stunts. Los Santos is a vast playground, a gangster Fortnite — a factor underlined by the massive community that still gathers in GTA Online (which is where we find this new version’s only totally new content — Hao’s Special Works, which lets you unlock faster cars and new tasks).

The Diablo-like MMO launched Friday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam’s most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there’s a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO’s record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2’s of 1,295,114. It’s not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it’s now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB…

The article notes it’s Amazon’s second big hit after its game New World “set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago.”

GameSpot also spotted a playful clause in the game’s terms of service. It specifies that while players must be human (and not AI), that doesn’t apply if Earth is taken over by robots, simians, or aliens. “In that event, Amazon said these beings will be allowed to play Lost Ark and other games. ‘We welcome our alien, robots, ape, or other overlords, as applicable,’ Amazon said.”

“We’re doing this because this may be part of the future of gaming,” said Matt Wolf, Zynga’s new vice president of blockchain gaming. “This is all about community building.” Nonfungible tokens are essentially digital deeds that verify the authenticity of the items they represent as unique. They are the latest internet-based collecting craze, and so far they have come in forms ranging from digital artwork and trading cards to virtual real estate and sneakers, as well as concert tickets and even sports highlights. The tokens are stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger that shows when they were purchased and for how much, and ensures NFTs can’t be duplicated or changed. Amid all that activity, NFTs’ advent in videogames holds particular significance because gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds. That makes them potential early adopters in the metaverse — a virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play and shop and where technology experts say the ability to buy and sell NFTs will be key.