jasx_games

JasX Survey 2022 - Appendix

Added 2022-01-16 00:30:24 +0000 UTC

A short appendix to the survey with division and drama. If you're averse to that, you won't miss anything by skipping this part, it won't be long, and mostly be rambling about crypto.

First off, someone asked about the question of ethnicity: What purpose does this question have for a survey about sex games?

The answer is the same for any other sensitive question such as transgenderism: because I'm curious who is playing my games. I'm not going to publish those stats, because I can't imagine they'd be interesting to anyone else. Also I encourage people to skip any questions they're uncomfortable with answering.

I find it funny that I've had to revise this question a lot recently, since something doge related seems to happen every now and then that revives the meme. In 2018 it was the dogecoin price spiking the first time, in 2020 it was dogelore getting popular on reddit, and in 2021 Elon Musk and a bunch of other celebrities propping up the price of the coin, and eventually tanking it after SNL.

Speaking of coins, let's address the elephant in the room: Crypto.

I'm not gonna reveal the exact stats of players holding crypto for privacy reasons. But the top 3 coins held are:

Dogecoin
Bitcoin
Ethereum (Though much less popular than the other two)

Honorable mentions to

BAT (The Brave browser thing)
Litecoin
SafeMoon (good luck you glorious bastard)

So let's talk a bit about why I accept crypto on my website.

It primarily comes down to the fact that I make pornographic content. Not only does it offer buyers more anonymity, but also because payment providers are really finnicky about what you're allowed to accept money for. Paypal, stripe, Apple pay etc all prohibit sale of adult digital goods. And visa/mastercard aren't that much better if judging by the whole pornhub thing in 2020.

That basically leaves you with blockchain, or payment providers that take extortionate fees for transactions.

Luckily since most of my games are on SL, I'm able to accept Linden Dollars. So I'm not hit by it as much. But having crypto as a payment option is still a good addition for people who can't or won't use linden dollars. And especially if I add purchasable items in any future standalone games.

That said, I'm not too happy with the large carbon footprint of PoW chains such as Bitcoin. And I'm hoping to add some lighter blockchains such as ALGO or maybe even look into the Bitcoin lightning network.

Alright, let's get to the huge elephant in the room.

NFTs, aka furry adopts for people with way too much money.

Whereas most people when they hear NFTs will think of online pictures or intangible goods such as memes being sold for ridiculous amount of money. That's not the whole picture. Simply put, an NFT is a unique token with a bit of text data attached which is stored in a shared database known as a blockchain. So I'd like to talk a bit about the use of NFTs as a means to store data in a public database rather than as a means to sell picture of monke for millions.

Let's take TF2 items as an example. Your TF2 item is just a unique identifier on Valve's servers saying that your account has access to the item while playing. If Valve ever goes bankrupt, or their datacenters all catch fire, the data is gone forever. A blockchain on the other hand is much more difficult to take down as it's distributed across thousands of servers across the world. However, if Valve decides to take down TF2, the data is rendered worthless regardless. Though if they had used NFTs to store their data, the items would be largely worthless too if the main game goes down.

Another difference is that when you trade TF2 items, you'll have to do so by playing by Valve's rules. Valve has the final say in any transactions, and may prevent you from trading, or removing your items for any reason, whereas nobody can tell you what you can or can't do with your NFT. But it's a double edged sword, since if you get hacked, Valve may restore your items, whereas if you forget your NFT wallet password, or if you send it to the wrong person/get hacked, it's gone forever.

I did, however, think of one use case for NFTs, and it's in open source online gaming. When you mint an NFT you can see who created it. If you use it as an (optional) way of storing items such as cosmetics, it can be used across multiple forks of a game.

Let's say I created a standalone online MMO and made the server and client both open source. This means that anyone could host their own clone of the game, and make any changes they want on it. Items/cosmetics are stored on my server, tracking who owns what item. However, the user could also have the option to mint said item as an NFT. The user could then use said item in clones of the game, being able to verify that the NFT was made by the game's original creator.

Clones could also add their own NFT minting, but they wouldn't immediately be usable by other peoples clones. The game host could obviously remove support for the original game's NFTs, but that's kinda like replacing someone's signature on a piece of art with your own. It's a lot easier to leave it be, and use it to encourage users to play on your server since they'd be able to port official items over.

Another solution would be to have your database be open and allowing cloned games to copy from it. But then it's not decentralized, it's federated. And if one node loses its data, that data is gone forever. If you take down a blockchain node, the data is still there perfectly fine on thousands of other nodes.

TL;DR: if I ever add NFTs to any of my games it'll be: