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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

I could see something amiibo (https://www.nintendo.com/amiibo/) like where the NFT basically unlocks things in different games but really struggle from a business perspective why you’d choose the crypto route over owning the market yourself. Particularly if there is supposed to be some permanence to the asset the NFT points to. For example the game no longer makes money but for some unforeseen reason someone owns an NFT of a game item worth $100,000 what happens when you pull all the game infrastructure and therefore the linked item down?

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Yeap, that's I think one of the disconnects - while it would allow you to have a market beyond the game the items, in the case of a fully digital TCG, are only valuable due to the game and their scarcity in the game, plus the game needs to have some game play options where having the items is relevant.

Amiibo looks more like the skinning/customisation market - probably they don't have an impact on the game.

In TCGs with games/tournaments where you need to own cards to play them there's an actual "desire/need" for a market to trade/buy - although it seems most digital TCGs nowadays all do the hearthstone thing of being able to "create" items by destroying others which diminishes the need for it, I personally don't like that mode, but I also don't see where a blockchain helps instead of a DB and backup of all "actions" recorded.

I might be wrong but what you pointed out is exactly why NFTs might succeed. Sure Nintendo has enough credibility to own and operate its own market, but for people who are trying to compete with Nintendo, the fact that artefacts are tradable outside the company's ecosystem and control becomes a point of differentiation.

I think it might actually work for other digital items outside games - sincerely in games unless they're interoperable between platforms I don't understand what would be the advantage - but maybe things like coupons, say you got a coupon from a signup somewhere, and it was represented as something with an expiry date, associated with an email or phone or wtv, but you were never going to use it, maybe selling that and the person associated with it changed to the new owner that then could redeem/use it? Again, not sure it's useful.

Or the token gets lost or the token is stored somewhere and goes down or ... a million other scenarios, that are just as easily served by a database?

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