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Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

This still makes absolutely no sense to me. The developer of Runescape is not going to collaborate with the developer of Warcraft to give them a copy of the model, figure out how the stats translate, put the textures in the right format, etc. Games use completely different equations for damage, defense, speed, etc. It's 100% magical thinking.

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.

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Yes, there is no metadata standard at the moment. But if that existed, the Runescape and Warcraft developers would not have to coordinate at all.

So.... this party hat asset comes with a permissive license that lets world of warcraft distribute it from their servers down to players' clients, right? So that the people who are playing on the same server as the owner of this NFT can see the hat, being worn by that player, in their game?

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?

Current games are unlikely to do so, but future iterations of games who want to bootstrap a player base would.

I reckon it’ll mostly be cosmetics but who knows. We’re still early.

The NFT piece of this is just such a small part of what’s needed to make this work though. This sounds like it is only something that would work in a very cooperative model - where the players and the games devs have their interests aligned in getting to use these shared assets.

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.

The last 50 years of software engineering would like a word with you about how few problems like this "standard metadata" has actually ever solved.

the current renaissance is driven by standard metadata

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

> But if that existed, the Runescape and Warcraft developers would not have to coordinate at all

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.

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