Let me slowly check and share some updates about Ex Populus for you!
This is the July 2022 news:
If you’ve been on the internet in the past year and a half, then you’ve most likely heard the term “NFT” thrown around. NFT stands for “Non-Fungible Token.” The Ex Populus team doesn’t like the term NFT. It’s an acronym that’s even more confusing when you find out what it actually means. So, what is an NFT? It’s nothing more than a digital item on a blockchain that can prove ownership. It may sound high-brow, but this perceived complexity is actually easy to unravel.
If you are a gamer, you have already used digital items in games that are the same as NFTs, but with some of the benefits missing. For gamers, the most obvious example that comes to mind is probably skins from Counter-Strike or League of Legends. These skins are very similar, but are different in the sense that the player actually owns these items because they are not built on a trusted public layer. Let’s be honest, most of the things we use blockchains for can be done with databases. Blockchains like Ethereum are superior because they are a trusted neutral layer that anyone can build on top of. Traditional databases are privately maintained, isolated, and become outdated over time. Imagine if you could query a persistent database in an open library containing digital items in a video game. This feature set enables new user experiences. In the case of Ethereum, you can think of your wallet address as your inventory, and your digital items exist in this inventory as objects that can interoperate in other games or applications on the same “open database”.
In the case of Web3 games, users will truly own their digital items. The current state of secondary markets for traditional games is extremely volatile and offers little protection to consumers. A player cannot sell their League of Legends skin unless they sell their entire account. Potential buyers will buy an account from someone, and the seller can often easily get back the account they just sold. Markets are significantly less efficient, more difficult to make, and buyers often fall victim to fraud because traditional digital goods cannot be verified or traded in a trustless environment. These issues are a result of players not truly owning their digital items. Just recently, Activision announced that Call of Duty: Warzone 2 will reset the inventories of players returning from Warzone 1. In other words, all of the cosmetics that players purchased with their hard-earned money were arbitrarily removed. All of these players were defrauded by Activision. Web 3 games take a player-first approach, and true player ownership is a core value in this new paradigm.
Web 3 games enhance the player experience by providing players with true, verifiable ownership, interoperability, strictly digital goods, and efficient secondary markets, but Web 3 games are not without their shortcomings. The main problems with Web 3 games are the lack of good games, difficult entry and messaging. The first complaint can be applied to the gaming industry as a whole. Greedy corporations have ruined the fun of many games, but Web3 offers a new opportunity for game developers to get the support they need without having to resign themselves to the status quo. There is still a lot of friction for traditional users to get into cryptocurrencies. Adoption has increased significantly over the past few years, but the industry still faces an uphill battle. Onboarding issues are also exacerbated by messaging issues in Web3. For those who don’t understand cryptocurrency, the jargon is confusing and prevents them from learning. As an industry, we need to do a better job of educating and evangelizing. It's hard to deny that Web3 gaming is a significantly better design paradigm that creates support for players around the world. Over time, players will eventually experience the Web 3 user experience they cherish. It's still early days for Web3 gaming, but the future looks brighter than ever.
