Bitcoin Forum

Can the Bitcoin Foundation succeed at lobbying Valve to use Bitcoin as ingame currency?

Well, if the Bitcoin Foundation can't make this happen then they should just disband.

I agree, this should be a no-brainer.  Help to get a pre-existing community to accept Bitcoin, with whatever software they might require.  Nothing too fancy, just make it work.

Using bitcoins as an online currency in a MMORPG would be brilliant. The game could be free but charge a small 1% fee on withdrawing bitcoins from the game.

The one thing that has ruined role playing games was their failure to maintain a stable economy. By using real currency this is solved.

However, I think in some areas this may be considered online gambling?

How is using a volatile currency going to encourage a stable economy?

Online game economies are an endless repetition of hyperinflation after hyperinflation. Compared to online game currencies bitcoin is rock solid.

Just as world governments endlessly produce more money to keep the ponzi scheme from collapsing online games produce more and more currency until its population is happily accumulating worthless bits.

Take control of the currency away from the game designer and not only is the economy hyperinflation proof but they can incoorperate numerous ways to siphon bitcoins from the economy with in game perks.

I think there is a very strong business model here. You let people play for free but they enter the game with no money. They can send bitcoins to become rich in the game or they could gather resources or do other services for other players to earn currencies. The revenue for the game servers comes from certain expensive resources that can only be bought from NPCs who pay the game authors.

Online games lack poverty, they lack the power for the rich to dominate the poor. I think that dynamic is an important part of an immersive role playing game. The face that you could be a great merchent in the game and then buy real gold coins with the profit is just gravy.

It is the difference between a poker game with a $2 buy in and a poker game with a $500 buy in. In the $2 game you really don't give a shit so you are reckless, the game is less intense. In a high stake game you really act with more caution creating a dramatic standoff.

Same goes for an in game world with real world stakes, people will act with strategy instead of attacking with abandon.

Using bitcoin for in-game currency is a great idea but it could only be made viable if game developers actually retained *some* control over movement of money.  If players are the only ones in control of their private keys that prevents the game developer from taxing the economy, the other extreme of the game developer controlling the private keys would essentially be a just another roach-motel scheme where rather than using bitcoins the players would be using *promises* to redeem to bitcoins and would have to rely on the game developer to honor those promises.  A hybrid system where balances are held in 2-out-2 multisig escrow account could potentially allow the game developers to tax the players without allowing them to run away or inflate the money supply.

It will be enough if they make something like Steamcoin and some good API to exchange them between users, nothing more ;)

In that case they will simply create another private-central-bank system similar to Linden Labs linden dollars for Second Life. The players and other companies deploying games on the Steam platform would have to trust Valve not to abuse or manipulate the system, also to provide stability for the exchange rate Steamcoin would have to be pegged to USD, which is not necessarily optimal for world-wide deployment.  If all they wanted to do is emulate Linden Lab's second life, they wouldn't need economists advising them. 

Anyway, it seems that they are going on this way:
http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/27/valve-economist-sees-the-future-discusses-ar-tech-hardware/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13zn4l/valve_wants_to_develop_a_single_currency_across/

It's not clear yet which way Valve will go, I agree with the original poster that Bitcoin Foundation should be able to lobby and convince Valve to adopt Bitcoin rather than creating an umpteen'th roach-motel private fiat system like Linden Labs in SL.

Instead of withdraw fees, they could sell "in game services and products". Like the NPC that sells you a weapon, he is actually "working" for the company hosting the game.

The Bitcoin Foundation is not the Bitcoin business development and marketing agency.

Also, you worded your title as if it was news (something happened, past-tense).   Unless you are intentionally trying to deceive people, adding a question mark to the end of the title is the least you could do for a scenario like this.

While that's true, Gavin personally as lead developer could try to contact them and make a case, if they'd listen to anyone I think they'd listen to someone with his expertise. On the other hand anyone can do this, they just may not be the most capable to make the best case on a technological level, that's all I'm saying.


I agree, even with the "?" at the end it still managed to fool me for a few seconds, so I changed it.

I think that it would be good that Gavin has a talk with Yanis Varoufakis more than VALVe, it can be useful for both ;)

That was then. After the Wordpress announcement, I'd bet on Valve making serious reconsideration.

I should talk with Valve?

I'm not an expert in video game economics, and I haven't yet seen a strong argument for why a game company would give up control of their own in-game currencies for a currency that they do not (and cannot) control.

If you've got a strong argument for why they should, then YOU should talk with Valve*. They're rational and profit-driven, so if it is in their best interest they should be willing to do it.

---

^{*Cue a flood of armchair-game-economists posting their half-baked thoughts here...}

+1, anyone can help with this.  I will see if I can reach out to Valve.  they may have some legal or accounting concerns that BitPay can address for them.

This is a great idea, but I think it'll be difficult to get valve on board, because valve is very strict about region locking, one of the method they use is blocking credit cards that are not from the region, using bitcoin would not be good for them.

I think the company you should try to convince is Riot, maker of the game "league of legends". There is no true in game currency for this game, they simply sell skins/champions/runepages for real money. This game is extremely popular, with 50M+ global players. They are very open to different payment methods, as shown by their payment page with tons of options. I think they would be very open to accepting bitcoin. Bitcoin would be a great way for Riot to expand their game to international markets that are traditionally difficult to accept payment from.

Also, there are many browser games that would benefit from bitcoin, for example travian or tribalwars.net. Their accepted payment methods are enormous, I think over 10 different options. One of them could be bitcoin.

They don't need to tax the economy. They can create wealth by selling fancy weapons, allowing the skipping of tedious level up activities and most importantly when a game monster kills you can takes your coin the monster gives it to its creators,

Even if someone decides to flood the game with bitcoins that will just draw people to game to get those bitcoins. Since bitcoin is a larger economy than the game's economy then outside forces will automatically balance it.

Easy way for an MMORPG to make money using BTC: Sell computer generated missiles to users for BTC. User uses the missile to blow something up. Sell more missiles and more things that just got blown up.

Rinse, repeat.

I think the initiative is destin to fail.
1. Every big company is more or less reluctant to use third party solutions, especially when comes to such crucial things.
2. Legal problems. If BTC got legally defined as money, that would require form Valve to get lots of expensive licences, as it wouldnt be just "community money"

So the legal risk is simply too big...

For the MMORPG, I think creating an alt-currency backed on BTC could be more interesting.

Instead of "mining", when people play, it generates hashes that are used to solve the blocks. When the block is solved, the MMOCoins could simply appear somewhere in the game. Since those coins can only be used for this game, it creates an autonomous economy. Using BTC directly in the game would make the game economy sensible to external events.

After that, if you want to "check out" of the game, you could simply sell your MMOCoins for BTC and bingo! You played a game and you made money!

Now...why I'm talking on this forum instead of coding that MMO.... ;D

This post peaked my interest in MMORPG economics.  For those interested in reading more, check out these articles...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/28/the-economics-of-video-games/ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/28/the-economics-of-video-games/)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/business/15views.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/business/15views.html)

I have to imagine that Value economist is keeping his eye on bitcoin since it offers a glimpse at an unregulated currency & economy outside of a computer game.

Great ideas here, thanks everyone for putting your collective heads together. I would like to see Bitcoin adopted by a large gaming company.

In a game it is not necessary to carry coin, you can carry lot's of stuff virtually, and the money supply do not have a impact in game's economy like in real life

Take SKYRIM for example, the money in the game is always limited, every merchant have less than several thousand coins, and typically an item can cost as much as 10000 coins

As a result, people do not store coins, they store items in their closet, lot's of items, maybe totally worth millions of coins, those items become a store of value instead, and they become useless in later part of the game play

So, in a game where BTC is applied, since the items can be generated endlessly, eventually they will worth almost nothing in BTC's value

In some games, items can be gifted to other toons. Some players create other toons just for the gifting aspect. My brother is a high level player investing thousands to get his main toons up to snuff. But for the past several months he's invested zero bucks, yet keeps leveling up his main toon, as well on his newly created one. I don't have a clue as to how he does it, but it has something to do with manipulating the URLs. There's only a handful of players in the well-known game he plays that take advantage of this.


Before I even came up to your post, Brunic (are we related?), I envisioned such a scenario, sans the specific MMOCoins aspect.

~Bruno K~

Game economies only suffer from catastrophic hyperinflation when bots and "chinese gold farmers" enter the fray and begin to exploit moneymaking schemes within the game..  solution?

ban chinese IP's..?  ;D

Not necessarily, since chinese gold farmer would simply up the block difficulty, like the big miners around here. It's not because there's more big miners that there is more coins available.

Let's say you're playing Super Mario MMO, and each time a player jump, it generates a "hash". Each time a "block" is solved, it creates 50 gold Koopas worth each 1 Mariocoin. To kill the gold Koopa, well, you need to jump on it, creating the incentive of jumping around. If there is too much jumping around, the numbers of jump you need to generate new gold Koopas goes up. And using games rules, you cannot just jump around, you still need to find the Koopas to get your coins.

MMO have economic problems because there's no cap. You can always create more virtual shit. But you can code a hard cap on a crypto-currency and nobody can goes around it.


No, I don't think we are related, but I like your first name  ;D

I think we're better off trying to get bitcoin into an MMO that is currently under development.  A good example might be "Pathfinder Online" which is soliciting funds via Kickstarter right now. 

http://kck.st/V4zZtU