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'.