Can Web3 Games get the basics right?
It is my first time posting in the Rant, Complain, Talk community. It is sometimes good to have a rant and get things off of your chest.
Having been active in the web3 space the last couple of years, I have seen quite a bit now thanks to Hive. There have been lots of projects come and go, promises made and broken. And we are where we are, hopefully further along than we were before.
However, I am finding my tolerence and patience for web3 projects really waining, especially when they cannot even get some of the basics right. I'm not going to name names, but there are plenty about to see.
Today I wanted to play a game after a couple of months hiaitus and needed to install it on my new PC. A simple task you might think..
As Charlie Murphy famously said.. Wrong! Instead of being able to download the game, it kept taking me in a loop of logging in and then clicking Play the Game over and over again. A really painful experience and I would give up here normally. I mean, I don't NEED to play the game.
OK, things can go wrong, life isn't pefect, so going to the FAQ or help and support section should help out...
Again, nothing of use there to help. The website is a nightmare to navigate. In the support section, the majority of people have clicked that the pages are unhelpful too, which should be a hint to improve them.
There is no guidance of the process to install the game, no link to the download page, no place to go if you have trouble downloading.
After some messages to support, I was given a link to download the game. I cannot fathom, why would downloading a web3 game be so difficult? Why does a basic step have to be so complicated? Why are we even downloading games when we have browsers to play them in.
If these teams can't organise to download a game easily enough for people, what else can't they do? (Tokenomics- run for the hills!)
Line Steppers
It is not limited to just this one off experience I had today, and it is not just this team, is seems habitual, it is throughout the web3 space that many simple things you would expect to work, just don't work:
No Help Guides
Buggy Websites
Complicated Registration (why even needed ?) and Login
Launching of a game when there is no game yet made.
Hard to understand tokenomics process
Launching a game that no one knows how to play
Boring staking NFTs or farming tokens.
Incomprehensible NFTs
Huge amounts of stats need to be calculated in Excel to do something
Errors or lag in game
The list goes on. I can understand this at the start of web3, but now web3 has been around for a while and these problems should be ironed out.
If you are making a game, you should at least make some instruction how to play it! These things may seem intuitive to a developer who has created the game and uses every day, but most people just want things to work. Switch on and go!
Until web3 starts moving in this direction, it will remain just a niche thing. The user experience sucks and everything seems overly complicated and needs to improve.
Anything annoys you about web3?
Thanks for reading my rant!
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Or let me say Web3 needs to make games more simpler and also easy to understand
I believe that things will always get better
Yes I think things must get better. The UI and UE will become more of a focus and things will improve. It was just frustrating today.
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My friend, who is a programmer, once said devs, and programmers are like racehorses with those pads next to their eyes completely unable to see themselves in the customer's or end user's shoes.
I think this is quite accurate and is only amplified on web3 surroundings as there might not be someone whipping them hard so they'd meet the deadlines and deliver.
Web3 user experience can be extremely painful as teams are pushing updates although their whole platform is barely usable.
Last fall I started using Solana and Cosmos chains and was pleasantly surprised how well their dapps worked. It was like stepping out of the darkness and into the light.
Other than that, and on many other chains, it's usually this 👇
yeah I can imagine the user experience has been totally forgotten with the development compared to high budget web2 projects for example. But I think this wont be so accepted so much in the future, or at least I dont want to play things that are not working anymore!
I agree. Competition is getting tougher and tougher and soon the neglecting of user experience won't play on web3 either.
I will play the Devil's advocate in this one, but what you said is BORING for the typical developer and he doesn't want to bother with writing real words... He is writing CODE, for God's sake! 😃
On the other side, hiring a gamer to write these "instructions" would be the easiest move which would probably cost less than 1% of the whole budget and probably earn +50% profits for the game...
Maybe one day we will get there...
Yeah, this makes sense from a financial perspective. Devs are usually paid very well and it isnt the best use of their time. I am not sure why they still cannot execute this part very well though, as you say there are quite a few options open to them!
I guess the problem is that these are often small teams, even single persons and they dont have the full backing and design, etc of the larger games companies. However, I do share your frustrations, and just to name a few:
On the positive side its refreshing to see the number of games in development at the moment, and some of the ones we have are working well and do have great support, etc. As more come online I guess some of the less well developed ones will fall by the wayside because the players will simply have more choice.
Those are great points and I am sure it will improve as things mature in web3 games. I can laugh about it today, but at the time I was pretty frustrated! I think you are right that overall we have lots of good games working well and have great support, so we are moving in the right direction too.
The user experience on web3 games can be frustrating and hard to bear with. I think the project teams should also prioritize working on the simple and boring stuffs other than just the exciting stuffs about the game.
Yeah, there are some things we take for granted and it would be good if they were improved in web3 games.
I can relate to many of what you said but what I like the most is "broken promises."
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Yeah, there have been many of those in this space! My living room is full of rugs now.😅
Woah! At least in my case, I only have a few. 😆
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All I can say is that if people really think web3 games are what is going to bring mass adoption, then think again. I don't see anything better than 2 years ago. As a rule, they are crude and rudimentary and not intuitive. Agree with you Steve.
You are right Ed. It doesn't look like it as there seem to be many gamers who don't like crypto games.
Well imagine gamers who play state of the art games coming to web3 ... it would not be for the games but the chance to make money if that is possible.
I must admit I rarely play games, but coming from you that is not good as you play lots.
There are a few good releases this year, I have a few to test that look good, but they still far off from the latest games. But the could encourage the Web2 game to adopt web3 elements abit.
I agree, provide instructions so people don't have to figure it out on their own. That's how I started in Splinterlands, pretty much clueless and alone. There are better tutorials now though than when I started.
That's a great list you came up with, and they're all important. How do you expect someone to play your game if it isn't user friendly.
Thanks. We are lucky in the splinterlands community there are many guides to find on Hive and people to help out. But for new games, they dont have that to fall back on.
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A lot of Web3 developers are inexperienced developers. That means they are fairly new to development. They should build something that works first before they get into blockchain development. Accept an internship, get a mentor, and work on a team that is actually building something useful ... in Web2. Then, after getting their feet wet and being successful at something, they can turn their attention to Web3 development. They don't get the basics right because they're thinking isn't basic. They have a first-day employee mindset with CEO aspirations. It doesn't work.
Thats a good way of putting it! 😅 There are some talented people around, but you are right, they need to learn how to walk before running. I just am not interested in any games that are not ready or released already at this stage. I've got limited time and games to play.
Yeah, don't we all. lol
The main problem most of the time in Web3 I would say is that most games / Devs start from the basis of wanting to make money instead of actually wanting to make a game along with the fact that the earning dynamics for players and the need for a working economy come at the cost of fun.
Splinterlands I would say actually started from the drive to make a good game, once they found a formula that worked they just tried to copy it with GLX / Arcade Colony / Soulkeep / Moon Karts which is bringing forward too just low quality as they are more tools to potentially make money compared to games that aim to be the most fun.
I think you are right, I think making a fun and decent game should come first and then think about tokenising or whatever. With games, I am more interested to own my own assets and trade them if I want. Hopefully we might see this interoperability within all games at some point. Its amazing to consider people wont buy a new song released now, but will pay the same price if it has a funky dance and lasts just 10 seconds in Fortnite!
You nailed it. Making a great game should be the first priority. If they did that, the money would follow. Starting with the goal of making money won't guarantee they'll make a game people will want to play.
I think a big challenge with a lot of these things is that it’s often a small team, sometimes just 2 or 3 people in total that’s doing all of this stuff. It’s frustrating for sure and it’s a lot to do but with time a lot of that stuff should get addressed!
I think you are right, it is probably small teams , multi tasking plus working on many projects and probably a day job too.