Love Steam, but you can do your own distribution pretty easily these days. If they want to miss out on the next platform evolution, that's a mistake they'll have to reckon with.
I don't see it affecting the NFT gaming market one bit.
All of this sounds completely dependent on the game designers, which is the opposite of decentralized, no? What requires NFTs? You can't just "bring" something into another game.
Isn't that kind of the point of NFTs? With an NFT, you hypothetically could bring something into another game. You'd need different developers to agree to recognize certain NFTs, though.
I think the better question to ask is the reverse: what requires bringing things into different games? Historically, nothing. This doesn't seem to be a thing most developers want. And if they don't want that, there wouldn't be a point to implementing NFTs, since they're already keeping things centralized.
So it's really just a philosophical discussion about the idea of things being tradable between and outside of particular games, and the potential merits of that, rather than a technical discussion about NFTs.
I'm picturing the initial sell as like those old Pokemon events or trading via the link cable, but you could buy a Trabant P601 from Gran Turismo, Zhongli from Genshin Impact, and Messi from FIFA21 to drop into the game too.
How do you make use of that sort of open-ended diversity without ruining gameplay? You'd either be limited to trivial uses (avatars/skins or randomizations) or you'd have a huge vector for feeding in game-breaking items and characters. The alternative is a closed network-- only allowing a small selection of pre-vetted NFTs that won't break the game, which adds very little value over something like the Skylanders/Infinity/Amiibo concept that already exists, except you don't get a cool figure too.
As an example, if someone has a Runescape party hat, they could equip that on their world of warcraft character.
Even if you did have game items transferring across totally unrelated games, you'd _want_ a centralized database to make bug fixes possible. After all, games as a class of programs aren't known for being bug-free.
But then if it's licensed that freely, what's to stop world of warcraft just using it in general? Put it on a bunch of NPCs. Let any player put it on their own character.
Or does the license have some sort of restrictions - 'you may only use this asset as a hat on the player character of the person who owns this NFT'? How's that enforced?
Seriously, WHY would WoW go to the trouble of supporting this nonsense?
I reckon it’ll mostly be cosmetics but who knows. We’re still early.
The most similar thing I can think of is like gravatar images - as a blog comment section it made some sense to let people bring their ‘identity’ with them in a low trust way.
Sure, that kind of interest alignment can exist in games but if everyone’s cooperating there’s no need for a system like NFT to enforce the rules about who gets to use what cosmetics.
At a minimum, there would need to be a known (to the asset developers) stable asset description format to target, covering both the cosmetics and in-game mechanics of the items, for every game the asset would target.
For it to work, game developers need an incentive to open their multiplayer games to third-party assets and asset developers need an incentive to target games they don't own with assets.
1) world of warcraft can incorporate the party hat asset
2) world of warcraft chooses to implement a mechanism where that hat can only appear on a character whose accountholder has authenticated as 'owning' the NFT that points to that hat
then yes, that could happen.
But... why would they do that?
Why would they not just rip the hat and put it up for sale in their own store for anybody who wants to pay them for it?
This is actually not that trivial from a technical standpoint and takes a lot of time and money to maintain.
First Runescape would need to set up and hire a team to maintain uptime on a few public facing web service servers and define an item status API. They'd need to integrate this web service into their backend infrastructure to give live updates.
Second World of Warcraft would need to write some custom code to read these party hats and their owners from the Runescape API and also maintain a way to link Runescape and World of Warcraft accounts so the right people get them (OAuth2 would likely do well here). WoW would also likely need to design the system to fail gracefully when Runescape servers are down.
This is just for read access, if WoW wanted to let players trade these hats then the Runescape API at least doubles in size and now includes synchrony assumptions and complexity in case players try to trade at the same time in both games. Not fun.
Alternatively Runescape could just make party hats NFTs and players would hold them in their own wallets. WoW would write a handful of lines of standardized code to read the NFTs from the player's wallets and display them in game. Allowing users to trade these items would also just be a few lines of code and would work seamlessly across these two (or more) games. Ethereum also has 100% uptime and the reliability allows designers to create a simpler system overall.
It's the difference between weeks/months and a few days of work on the development side. It's also more standardized and compatible with all other apps when using ERC-721.
Meshes with different LoDs, textures, animations, skeleton weights for physics? (I mean, obviously you want your party hat to flop around realistically when your character emotes, right?)
And WoW is going to take this arbitrary untrusted asset from a player-provided NFT, and... load it into the WoW client of every other player who is near the player.
Yeah, that sounds like a terrible, terrible idea.
The content moderation aspect (textures covered in swastikas or porn?)... the possibility of players providing meshes that are ridiculously large or complex... the security attack surface...
This does not sound like 'just implement a few lines of code and you're done'.
there are primitive games that are building on top of other projects' nfts because it's a way to secure an initial audience.
in the absence of licensing restrictions, the nft owners are incentivized to prefer projects that provide utility for their nfts.
Ok, but the supposed benefit was to a game's prospective competition. Why in the hell would the game developer want to license content created for their game to be used in a competitor's game?
> in the absence of licensing restrictions, the nft owners are incentivized to prefer projects that provide utility for their nfts.
And everyone who doesn't have those NFTs have no such incentive. Even if I own game X's NFTs, there is no disincentive for me to play game Y that straight up uses game Z's NFTs for free. Or hell, even if it used game X's. I might want to play with an item I don't have in game X, after all.
If a game came out tomorrow that reused TF2's hats and shit, do you really think anyone would consider the fact that they have hats in their TF2 account a disincentive to play the new game?
This is like that part in HGttG[0] where the Golgafrinchans decided leaves were currency and burnt down the forests to ensure their scarcity. I have no idea why you people can't see how mad you all are.
[0] In case anyone doesn't know: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
imagine you paid a few hundred or thousand dollars for the hat, you'd be strongly incentivized to call the games that aren't contributing back to the ecosystem freeloaders. and as for everyone else, there's a thin line between not caring about the artist getting paid and piracy, and i suspect there isn't a whole lot of money in the segment anyways.
your last analogy makes no sense.
Alternatively, a game could also offer SFTs (semi-fungible tokens, as described in ERC-1155 [1]), in which case players could trade multiple identical versions of some indivisible asset. Something like a skin or a hat would be an SFT unless only one copy of it existed (i.e. only one player could ever use that skin or hat at any time).
NFTs = typically (and at a low level arguably always) non mutually interchangeable, aka unique.
(The problem with NFTs in this analogy is that transferring car titles has legal weight, while selling an NFT probably doesn't without additional contractual language.)
Think about it, a much smaller fish could offer a very similar game that uses the inventories of NFTs from GameA and become a serious threat to the business of GameA overnight by sniping the player base with the promise of keeping their inventory.
It is also a design challenge. One of the design benefits of a new game is you can cancel, rework, or nerf strategies that players spent money on in the previous game.
So I could build this infrastructure on mongodb/dynamodb in a single weekend, offer it without $$$ minting/gas fees, still get higher margins, point out my solution is green, and offer my simpler solution to game devs, and everyone will be better off.
“ NFT games such as "Axie Infinity" and "NBA Top Shot" let people earn money by grooming and selling animal characters called Axies, which players treat as digital pets. […] They will then groom these Axies, team up with their friends and make Axies do battle like Pokemon, and build so-called "virtual kingdoms."“
In any other game the characters you develop are essentially the _same_ as any other character played by any other player—maybe with the exception of the character name which you could personalize.
I can appreciate the notion that you can develop a character which can be uniquely identified.
Without devolving into a philosophical argument about games simulating reality, I’m thinking you can see NFTs as a fundamental change, because NFTs offer a unique player experience. If Eve Online creates a unique experience by allowing players to create corporations, then NFT character is a unique experience at the individual player level.
Unique digital assets are compelling like baseball cards
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/263796/20210805/how-do-nf...
That's something that I believe is currently a big issue in our society, so many things are pushed between black and white. You can definitely see the advantage of both system and use both in their own when one is better than the other. The fact that you see potential in a decentralized value transfer system and want it to evolve doesn't means that you believe every single thing need to be decentralized. I'm sure you downloaded something using P2P, yet you are still enjoying centralized file distribution everyday too.
Not only that, but Steam doesn't require any exclusivity or dependence to their platforms. That means that as a publisher, you can share it on multiple platform, which make it essentially decentralized...
> Sweeney: We aren’t touching NFTs as the whole field is currently tangled up with an intractable mix of scams, interesting decentralized tech foundations, and scams.
[1] https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/144251952287594906...