But why would I need NFTs for that?
Like in some sense all the NFT is to the game you develop is a minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about to trade it around and then anyone can provide the receipt back to your game later to be the potentially-new owner.
All blockchain gives you is the payment and settlement part of the process (a private key can reassign "ownership" of the pointer to your document), and it does so at the expense of any ability to reverse a fraudulent or accidental trade. Got a virus and lost your apes? Wow sucks to be you, if you're no longer the owner please take it out of your profile.
this is such a widespread misrepresentation/falsehood in crypto, that it makes all this other stuff go away, like we suddenly won't have any trading firms or crypto exchanges, therefore no need for buildings or employees or heating or lighting. I've literally had people on HN tell me that crypto was gonna mean no more "wasted power and heat" from financial services companies, like commodities or equity traders are just gonna disappear because we came up with a new mechanism for HFT.
Like I said they give you the trading platform too (the thing web app that issues the onchain transactions, and shows what's for sale) because you can use a third party one.
> and it does so at the expense of any ability to reverse a fraudulent or accidental trade.
That is mostly true now, but it doesn't have to be that way. We've come a long way with things like time locked transactions and social recovery features, but I agree it still needs to improve.
I don't think I'm under any misconceptions here, my work is related to crypto, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Each game does this differently, their code is not the same, their assets are managed in many ways. How do you propose to deal with this?
Have you tried to develop a game? It's much more complex than most applications. There are no standard libraries or APIs for this type of thing.
But this wasn't just the same company, it was, with some incremental modifications, the same game engine, and by the time the last entries came out, it was showing its age. There's no way you could have taken, say, a character—or even an item—from a completely different game like Ultima VI and turned it into an NFT that could then be added seamlessly into SSI's Secret of the Silver Blades. The two games, despite both being RPGs that came out the same year, are just so completely different that it wouldn't make any sense even if Origin and SSI did want to collaborate on making that possible.
NFTs would still be a "thing of value" and still be beholden to all the same rules as other things of value.
You still have AML issues.
Unity / Unreal Engine asset stores are just that aren't they?
My point was though that interoperable game assets aren't farfetched, they already exist.
Every NFT requires the work.
We are talking a couple of hours per NFT - and ongoing work and testing.
There's a reason most games only have a few outfits or a handful of cars players can choose. Every model, skin and so on is a pile of regular, ongoing work.
Even SecondLife required per-model import work, rigging, custom scripting, etc.
FALSE. The assets from the games are not being traded in your hypothetical. The NFTs are.
> minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset
TRUE, BUT all it does is confirm someone calls dibs on something. Actually integrating those dibs in any sensible way is a huge task. It might be the "Deluxe Crystal AstroBlaster9000" in one game, but due to trademark issues, you might have to settle for "1 Ripe Banana" in another.
> so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about
UNLIKELY. Developers would be one hashtag away from the Internet mob demanding they not allow people to use items pointed to by NFTs purchased with Dunning-Kruggerands that have dirty histories. The whitepapers might say you don't have to worry about it, but the users will.
Then there are security concerns. There will be a bad contract. There will be a phishing scam. The whitepaper might say code is law, but the users are still going to want the developer to make it right, or they'll walk.
In the steam marketplace, the developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.
We already know in game items that affect gameplay basically ruin the game for anyone that isn't a whale. The NFT proponents think they can get everyone emotionally invested like the whales are, but good luck catering to the masses to keep them happy. It's only possible with whales because there aren't many of them and they're the largest source of revenue.
Once you realize that blockchain and NFTs are about charging processing fees for every single event that happens the whole thing looks terrible. Eventually you'll be paying fees to track your items stats, so every time you click or tap it costs money.
NFT doesn't block this at all. Just because an attribute on the token specifies it's rarity, doesn't mean there aren't a gajillion other tokens pointing to the same thing. Or that someone won't just tweak things on the server so that token_url /foo/92 isn't legendary magic beans anymore but common turd burgers instead.