checking out the crypto gaming magazine’s 2026 “most anticipated” list to see how blockchain gaming has been going
Discussion
@molly0xfff Unless I'm missing something, none of them are Web games at all. Does "Web2" just mean "no cryptoshit" to them? In that case I'm off to eat a Web2 sandwich before I go to Web2 sleep.
@molly0xfff I know they say this all the time but the idea of labelling regular video games “Web2" is still so funny to me. Is Elden Ring using AJAX?
@misty bring back flash games
@molly0xfff what do you mean "anyway" 😂
@molly0xfff ugh, legacy web2 gaming and its obsession with "compelling interactive experiences". I would much rather drop a million bucks into nonfungible ape urls.
@molly0xfff wha is a "web2" game... habbo hotel?
@molly0xfff Wow! What an editors note 😂
i love the implication that crypto gaming was fundamentally sound and only died because VCs failed to manifest it
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@molly0xfff 😱 not the forever games! 😭
🤣
I still find it amusing how intensely some people here in Vegas are so into the Blockchain, Crypto, and I'm fairly certain some people are still into NFTs.
Note, Vegas thinks it is The Next Silicon Valley and Hollywood 2.0 at the same time, so why not go all in on Blockchain? And AI, of course. The light coming off that sphere must be confusing people…
@molly0xfff my carnival attraction, the burning pile of money, has been discontinued. We sold matches and gasoline. Unfortunately, the investors got scared.
@molly0xfff at least I can burn my pile of beanie babies for warmth this winter
@molly0xfff RIP Tinkerbell. Not enough clapping.
@molly0xfff My dream of forcing everyone to use the shit-in-eye machine (a machine that puts literal shit in your eye) was *smothered* by venture capitalists. Those bastards.
@molly0xfff You could argue that crypto gaming DID only die because VCs failed to manifest it. After all, was anybody really in it just to have fun?
@molly0xfff crypto is always about "hype the tech and blame everyone else". Can't get a bank account? Blame regulators. Can't launch a product? blame the government. Someone gets hacked? Blame the victim. Business can't make any money? Blame investors.
"This would be such a good idea if everyone really liked it and gave me lots of money to build it and didn't blame me when it went wrong and kept using it forever" is not a business plan, it's a letter to santa
@m1ke @molly0xfff “entire collections of digital assets rendered practically useless”
Isn’t one of the promises of NFTs that they will *always* be available? 😉
@ramsey @molly0xfff the argument is that you'll always own them and somehow the boosters missed the fact that owning a signpost doesn't benefit you if the thing it's pointing to is demolished
@molly0xfff They’re so close to understanding that *all* crypto “success" depends on someone’s money faucet being left on.
@molly0xfff the thing that gets me about literally 100% of all the crypto stuff is they've all subscribed to this architecture where some immutable ledger can grow infinitely. forever. it can scale to petabytes
and nobody has any fucking idea what to do when the shit gets so big it starts to get unweildly. like, they never thought about it. or they figured it was someone elses problem.
its basic sysadmin 101 stuff too
@molly0xfff
"entire collections of digital assets ... useless".
*fake surprise face*
Oh my. The humanities!
@molly0xfff "It didn't die on its own" I mean if no one is buying crypto games, doesn't that imply they did, in fact, die on its own?
@molly0xfff "entire collections of assets rendered practically useless" implies they were once useful.
@molly0xfff my dreams of a theme park operated entirely by trained squirrels were quashed by the lack of VC support. Too much liability they said. Who would want this they asked. Just no vision.
@Finitum that dream didn’t end on its own—it was smothered
@molly0xfff Leaving the eminently tempting sarcastic jabs aside, I'm curious as to what kind of game you'd even play on a blockchain.
Turn-based RPGs? Correspondence board-games?
Maybe it's just because I lack imagination (and I won't deny that charge) but I don't see what unique capabilities it would provide. Even speculating on assets has been around for decades, thanks to trading cards.
...or am I explaining the punchline here?
@KatS https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?tech=gaming a lot of Pokemon clones, and a bunch of games where in-game assets are NFTs
@molly0xfff So, nothing that can't already be done without it, unless I'm missing something.
That's what I thought.
@KatS @molly0xfff I mean, they do one thing. Make a record that can't be forged easily. Maybe to prove that you didn't cheat in a speed run or tournament? Everything else seems like a case of "why wasn't this done with a database"?
The only crypto game I have ever personally seen was https://store.steampowered.com/app/2702170/Strange_Jigsaws/
(Spoiler, it's a fantastic Indy puzzle game no blockchain involved)
@bipolaron @KatS even then that would imply that a significant avenue for cheating was gaining access to a tournament database and forging your score
@molly0xfff @bipolaron @KatS And even that could be done by a public-key signature.
The only benefit of a blockchain is if you need to later revoke a record (ex: you Player A sells to Player B, and we want to make sure Player A can't use it anymore).
Just knowing that Player A was valid can just be ex: OpenSSL to sign the data blob, and validating that the game's private key signed the blob (by using the public key).
@molly0xfff @bipolaron @KatS So basically it's pretty much useless outside of trading or a durability system.
@molly0xfff "entire collections of digital assets rendered practically useless" hmmm you don't say
@molly0xfff By 'Dedicated player base' they mean all the suckers who bought in early hoping to be virtual landlords, ruling chunks of nonexistent land and charging people to use their NFT's for grinding a few pennies worth of in game crypto currency. Nobody played their games for very long, but they made for entertaining videos of people exploring, slogging around in low poly, yet incredibly resource intensive virtual ghost towns.
"Tinkerbell investments", they disappear if people stop believing in them
@molly0xfff sadly nobody could have predicted…wait. Never mind.
@molly0xfff entire collections of assets rendered practically useless? say it ain't so! all my apes, gone!
@molly0xfff Who could've imagined that turning gaming, a thing you do in your spare time for fun, into a job was a bad idea!
@molly0xfff something deeply clownish about referring to GTA 6 as a "web2" game
