I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
It could also be used by anything else, really.
Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
> A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database.
So... Game X has enabled competitors to steal their customers by not using their own database. What exactly is the benefit here? If it's the same company they can just use their own database.
What if Game X and Game Y decide they don't get along and start to flood the network with items that are worthless in Game X and EXTREMELY VALUABLE in Game Y? There are so many reasons you don't want to cede control of your game world to a competitor company!
> Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
Oh good, all we need is for all games to define their item data on a universal scheme that fits the needs of every single game.
I feel like most of the NFT arguments I've read in this thread are assuming that somehow using an NFT gets you out of the cost of actually spending the art & dev time on producing the cosmetic - just because it exists in another game doesn't make it appreciably any cheaper to add to your game.
I will admit there are ways to make art more "valuable" by actually limiting the number of available copies - but that trendiness is hard to effectively harness. Beanie Babies took off in the 90s and everyone's brother started buying up newly released ones... almost all of which were worthless because they scaled up their production to meet demand - and if they hadn't they wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of.
So, its good for a competitor to the original game developer. What motivates the original developer? If they want to bootstrap a new game feom an old game user base and purchases DB, they can do it without a public database of assets while excluding competitors from the same opportunity.
A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality.
A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
If you ignore that NFTs are basically a glorfied registry for micro transactions.
This is like buying a $200 refill cup from a movie theater then being allowed to use it at a competing movie theater chain, except the cup isn't real. It was never a good deal, and there's no incentive for theater's to join in.
One of the big changes in the way I've viewed this is because the blockchain we're talking about already exists. A lot of the technology is already there so over time the idea of creating a new shared database and managing it becomes more work than just using some libraries and an existing shared database - even with limitations.
> A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
Selling the game, surely.
And that technology exists does not make a notional use of it something people actually want or need. The reason for a lack of co-marketing isn’t a lack of technology as the parts of my post you didn’t quote note.
This is not a solid business plan.
Also, bear in mind that you still need to cook all those meals (or, rather, do all the art for those cosmetics). And if you're making art you probably want your normal players to be able to give you money for it as well... and you might not want to give it away for free to players just because they supported this other company that's not you.
Why is this better than just "Come over to my game and get all the benefits that everyone gets, even if you didn't play <Game X>!"
Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
I feel like you're on the cusp of a penny drop moment here with blockchain
And I'm really not sure what you're getting at. This particular use of NFT is as certificate of unique ownership. That's what the original buyer thought they were obtaining.
Now - maybe they shouldn't or maybe they were deluded - but that's currently how NFTs are being marketed.
Isn't it?
> Otherwise what's to stop multiple games trying to adopt the same group of NFTs?
Nothing at all. Breaking data out of small silos into one large database opens up possibilities like this.
Anyone can mint an NFT to point to anything. There's no guarantee beyond what's traceable on the blockchain. Once the NFT "points" to something outside of the blockchain, then all bets are off.
they hardcode a content-addressable url (eg. ipfs). there's no domains to take over.
Maybe they're all games you made, maybe they're all games built in a community, maybe it's a fan made extension of another game. Those all have reasons you may want to add access to something based on data from another game. Perhaps it's a core mechanic, where puzzles are only solvable by completing tasks in other games. Perhaps it's just letting you play as Guybrush Threepwood if you've played the first Monkey Island.
It doesn't have to be all within games. Gated access to communities perhaps (a speedrunning discord if you've got a certain achievement).
The ingenuity of game devs never ceases to surprise me, and sharing data between programs is fundamental to lots of interesting systems so the idea that sharable data between games provides no utility is odd to me.
I've worked in the gaming industry. Margins are incredibly tight and the timetables are usually extremely brutal. It'll take time to support different character models and swappable cosmetics have, on multiple occasions, resulted in game exploits. One of the early notable ones was Oddjob in Goldeneye[1] but you also often see clipping bugs where tall characters might clip through no pass boundaries and either insta-kill themselves or find a way to get out of bounds. These things have costs.
1. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-08-23-21-years-after...
This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.