Video game cosmetics derive their appeal from people using them while they actually play the game, not from showing off the database flag that activates it for the account. With NFTs, the whole game part of the game cosmetics analogy is missing.
So then you have to move to a whitelist system where someone centralized (or a DAO) has to manually act as a copyright system, whitelisting hashes, duplicating the work of the existing copyright and legal system.
Who is going to pay a studio to develop the models, artwork and code required to have a ‘NFT skin’ in a game? Money is made by selling a skin multiple times to return effort.
And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA? The whole concept is a nonsense.
Influencers + shady finance have collided to *create a climate melting scam.
Edit: spelling and errant word
A physical world example is the combination of social media marketing, fast fashion and product drops. Items are sold for many multiples of their production cost due to a manufactured air of exclusivity and scarcity. As the items are mass produced from exploited labor, a bottleneck from time consuming highly skilled craftwork cannot be the cause of high prices.
There are many examples of conspicuous over consumption and status goods, all of them defying common sense to most. Remember the "I AM RICH" app? The NFT version is the same principle, merely on a different type of datastore.
Particularly relevant to NFTs is the art world of artificially inflated prices, donations to manufacture prestige and where fakes are hard to tell to the untrained eye and wealthy buyers bring lawsuits or otherwise buy the silence of those who can prove forgeries.
The artifact or artwork is not the goal, instead the ability to take something useless or mundane but somehow demonstrable as unique, prove provenance and flaunt wealth to some peer group considered high status is the goal. I suspect NFTs are currently in a gold rush stage and comparatively more open. When the loose flow of money is over, I expect it will decay back to gated elitism typical of the existing art world.
Underlying something like an Ethereum linked IPFS hash artifact are interesting consensus algorithms for persistent data-structures on open distributed networks. That they're being used in this manner is not surprising. It's reflective of humans, not something inherent to the utility of the tech.
>And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA?
Too bad. Most games are not going to put in work to support other game's cosmetics.
In what way, specifically?
From your original comment: "imagine something like steam profile avatars/pictures etc. tied to your identity that you can use on any page that implements it."
That sounds 100% like Gravatar. We already have exactly that, without any of the problematic aspects of being tied to NFTs or blockchain.
While true, the only one deciding whether you are granted the ingame usage is still the developer/publisher, so in that scenario you basically just did exactly the same thing as before: a database lookup to check if a player "owns" a particular item. Only this time with a much slower and more inefficient database. Nothing about it being a NFT grants any advantages in that case, the developer can still take it away, ban your account, remove the item from the game etc. because they are still the ones controlling everything. You just decentralized the database entry.