Hacker News Reader

Comment by skinnyasianboi | Hacker News Reader

It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on.

Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.

Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.

View on HN

But it’s not. It’s a token on a blockchain with some metadata. You’d actually need a separate legally binding contract to link it to actual ownership, and at that point you could have just made up the legal contract without any blockchain or token…

With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…

Imagine an indie game developer creating an open-world game where you can use your Sims furniture, Warcraft sword, Stardew Valley animals and so on.

I don't quite understand your first point. Edit: the NFT is verifiable in your wallet and comes from a verified source

Doesn't your indie developer still have to acquire both licenses and assets for all those items, since NFTs (a) don't actually convey a recognizable legal ownership or right of any kind and (b) impose costs proportional to size in bytes, and so can't effectively store the actual data over which they claim ownership?

Good points. (b) The actual data (jpeg, mp4, 3d mobdel, etc) is usually stored on a system like https://ipfs.io and not on the NFT chain itself. (a) I think the optimal solution would be that it is in the interest of publishers to have their assets used in other projects. This would give them more value, and the NFT creator usually charges a transaction fee on their assets (every time something is sold on the secondary market, a percentage goes to the creator). Another option would be for the indie developer to assign these items to their own items. For example, AAA studio sword xy is assigned to indie game sword xy. Of course you can't manually assign zillions of NFTs, you would probably do this in tiers and I would imagine there would be services built around that. This would eliminate the IP problem as far as I know, and would just mean that owning NFT xy unlocks a feature/element in the game. This would of course be interesting for official collaborations between publishers.

> You’d actually need a separate legally binding contract to link it to actual ownership

Why? The blockchain already does this. All you need to do is hold the private key to the wallet.

You listed centralized services, so even with nfts they still can be made useless or revoked/etc.

You mean that your in game items get revoked after you got banned from a game? That's actually a good point. It wouldn't help you to sell these items on a secondary market except you try to scam someone. At least the items could still bring you value in external games/prokects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com