AMD Joins The Blockchain Game Alliance
Those who sold shovels during the California gold rush made a lot of money. It is therefore not strange that AMD would join Ubisoft and a long list of startups in a "Blockchain Game Alliance".
written by 권유리 (Kwon Yu-ri) 2019-12-15 - last edited 2019-12-16. © CC BY
AMD sent out a press-release which indicates why they would be joining the list of mostly lesser-know companies in the fringe "Blockchain Game Alliance":
"In addition, Robot Cache will use secure, high-performance AMD EPYC™ processors in the back-end servers powering its platform, and ULTRA will use AMD EPYC™ processors for its blockchain to facilitate block producing."
AMD is the first and only hardware manufacturer to join the "Blockchain Game Alliance". They are, therefore, the only member who's supplying the blockchain equivalent of shovels to a gold-rush which largely collapsed years ago.
The rest of the members, like the Planetarium blockchain gaming platform written in .NET, are all about software. Some of them make free and open source software. A disappointing amount are not. A "blockchain" produced by closed-source software running on a few servers is someone's basement is called a database and no amount of marketing spin aimed at gullible investors will change that. It really does not matter if a proprietary game is connecting to a proprietary game server which stores in-game items "owned" in a MySQL database or a "blockchain" which consists of 3 severs sitting next to the game server. You would, in both cases, be blindly trusting the game publisher to "do the right thing".
Looking at the list of players in the alliance compels us to point out that free and open source crypto-coin wallets like Bitcoin Core and Electrum are trustworthy because they are free software while crypto wallets from members of the Blockchain Game Alliance, like DAPP Pocket, are proprietary closed source products which should NOT be trusted or used by anyone. The same applies to games and anything else which "uses blockchain" for that matter, crypto-related claim with no publicly available source-code to back them up are, by their nature, worthless.
It is also tempting to point out that if your websites front page is a 2 MiB pile of scripts and CSS which doesn't even display anything at all if Ublock Origin is enabled then you're probably doing something wrong.
Ubisoft appears to be the only large, well-known and established video game company on the member list. They are all about that closed-source proprietary software which makes it hard for them to provide any trustworthy blockchain-based solution since it would require them to demonstrate that trustworthiness with actual source code.
None of the Blockchain Game Alliance's "minor" problems are relevant to AMD, though. They can enjoy their membership confident that a server sold is a server out the door regardless of how fast the buyer runs out of investor money.
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