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Comment by shuger | Hacker News Reader

NFTs are completely useless for this. Why would game use blockchain to store ownership of an item? There are exactly 0 benefits to doing that instead just tracking it on their won servers in old normal database. Since anyone can create duplicate NFTs they would have to track which ones are genuine which defeats the whole purpose.

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If done well, it could prove to me that I could trade the asset at my will, without the game's platform blessing.

I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.

I also imagine that generating a market for real money in a game is a legal PITA for game developers, and NFTs frees developers from any liability since they are not in charge of its trading, transactions are not in their database anymore and they have no power over them

Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs. On the other hand, in the database world of games, it requires specific integrations with a centralized database

> I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.

Why would game developers ever implement a system that lets you circumvent the rules?

> Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs.

What? They still have to write code to interpret the NFT in their game. They still need specific integrations for every single token they need to support, and they also control what that token is. If they choose to interpret your really expensive sword as a common one, well, tough luck.

This is just centralisation -- entirely.

You cannot create duplicate NFTs. That is the whole point. The reason to have NFTs (and also fungible tokens) in games is that the gamers would know and be able to trust that the quantity of a given item was fixed. There may be more appeal to play a game where the economy was predictable and couldn't be later manipulated by the company or original game creators.

But the game developers own the database, so if they want something to be unique, they can already do that!

None of this are either actual problems that developers have, or things that users want. Never once has someone playing a game say "boy I sure wish all these hats were more expensive!"

The developers cannot make something trustlessly unique. If they control the database it is a simple query to up the count to 2!

NFTs neither do nor can enforce uniqueness too. Blockchain is a method to, as you put it, trustlessly couple a particular instance of a datum with a keypair. Game developers can duplicate the blob describing in-game asset in their own database or on the blockchain. For off-chain data blockchains are nothing more than a datastore which provides immutable link between a datum and a keypair.

So yes there is an original keypair that establishes the data. But ones established it can be fixed in a verifiable way. A game client, community of art lovers, government agency, social consensus, then recognizes that nft as corresponding to some offchain asset. It cannot be later changed, duplicated, etc without some social consensus to do so. You don't need to trust a third party with control.

Game developers can mint more tokens at any time. There's nothing technical ensuring scarcity of NFTs, and gentleman's agreements don't need a blockchain.

For game assets the game is necessarily the central trusted authority. Ethereum has a speed of C64 and latency of a postal pigeon, so you can't run a game server on the chain. Therefore, you have to trust an off-chain game to actually honor what the blockchain says. This is not substantially different than Steam CS:Go skins, except for industrial-scale coal-rolling.

> Game developers can mint more tokens at any time.

That's a very valid criticism of most game implementations (maybe all? I only know like 3 and they are all centralized blockchains -- puke), and that's why I'm staying away from them too, at least for now.

But I cannot deny there's real potential here, I can imagine totally open source games without servers, just p2p connection for battles (like we used to do to play Age of empires) and its assets backed by NFTs

As has been said, how does the game engine enforce ownership of those assets? The best it can do is query a blockchain (and for p2p games without central server every client must also become a node in all backing blockchains) and check ownership of corresponding private key[s]. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from minting a new NFT describing in-game assets, therefore the *content* of NFT must be signed by players in a match or some other external entity, but the blockchain makes no guarantees about the content.

Most of the blockchain properties only apply to on-chain assets. The very moment you involve an off-chain party, blockchain becomes append-only database with performance of table top calculator and latency of postal pigeon and is therefore a shitty database.

The only valid use case I see is a smart contract that automatically issues certain assets, which could be seen as somewhat of a solution searching for a problem, but games are not the problem. With games all clients must agree on game state anyway, storing game state on the blockchain is too expensive/cumbersome and if you have to agree on game state anyway, the state can also include assets.

The game client reads only canonical game assets - you can't just add any nft willy nilly.

An nft can also include a hash of some offchain data. In this way it can make a verifiable claim about content.

The "content" doesn't matter, all that matters is the NFT id (or hash, whatever is used to uniquely identify it). The game is what players have to coordinate about, make sure is the same one, and the exact same version of it. Because the code is the only thing that gives real meaning (the content) to that NFT. The blockchain is ONLY used to track ownership of and id (The NFT) nothing else is required.

I mostly agree on everything else you said as the current state of NFT-games. But unlike you, I do see potential for different kinds of games and dynamics that are not possible or impractical in database-games. I don't think they will be the same type of games we are used to, if you kill it now, we will never see into what it evolves.

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