NFTs add nothing to this except hype and extra processing power required to mint them. Without the game, the NFTs are worthless; without the NFTs, the game could work exactly the same.
I don't think anyone led with anything like that, except someone enjoyed the streamlined process of having their game assets outside the game because of the standardized interface.
Developers like the streamlined aspect of implementation, the immediate global audience instead of requiring 20 different payment processes that change all the time, the ability to completely forego making a user model and user state management and user balance management since its all done by the blockchain nodes and libraries, and the ability to bootstrap a community quickly who do all the evangelizing for them.
The users like the portability, even when acknowledging that they still rely on the developer to not deprecate the assets or dilute the supply in other ways. The users do look for ways and competing projects that reduce the developer's ability to do that by leveraging the same technology different ways.
None of this collectibles and gaming audience is interested in physical objects. This audience was already trading in digital collectibles in games, that just had less portability.
Edit: Also, if the games servers died so would your collection of cards. If for whatever reason the devs killed Gods Unchained someone could build a fork and we'd be able to take our cards over there because the asset is decoupled from the game. Bit of an edge case but in a world where people complain that digital ownership is false (such as ebooks) then it could be a fun solution.
Here by “you”, do you mean the player or the developer? If you mean the former, that’s solvable if implemented in the game (MTGO, diablo 3’s auction house, and how could I forget Artifact). If you mean the latter, I don’t see this as an advantage to me as a player at all. In fact I could argue that having to purchase eth would be an extra hassle to me.
> Also, if the games servers died so would your collection of cards. If for whatever reason the devs killed Gods Unchained someone could build a fork and we'd be able to take our cards over there because the asset is decoupled from the game
I don’t think I’m understanding this right. Is the game open source?
What’s the asset that’s decoupled from the game? The ownership data on the blockchain?
If the game logic is not fork-able as well, I don’t see the value in forking the chain. Your collection will be lost as cards in the sense of gaming cards.
I edited my post because in the paragraph above I compared that to “the Hearthstone team releasing the card art to the players once they shut down the game”, but I’ve since realized that if the fork is about the ownership, the art would also be lost unless it was either released to the public or already public. In any case I can’t see the value in keeping original ownership information about (a copy or instance of) public digital art.
I’m asking in good faith just to be clear.
I meant the developer. I know this tech does exist but Diablo had to build their own auction house, integrate with Stripe, build a store, etc... I never saw MTGO, I just believed it could exist. Any ERC-721 compliant asset can be traded and stored on any NFT marketplace, so you get all of these things for free as long as you write a bit of code for the card. In my eyes the time it takes to get something up to become tradable on Ethereum is similar to getting a blog going on RoR - it can take only minutes. Also become Ethereum trades are atomic transactions it gives us more power than most game stores, for example I could trade my Shiny Pikachu for your Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Not for money, but for other games assets. As part of the same Transaction. Think about a Runescape trade where you have the items on your side and their side - you know if you click accept and they click accept you're going to get each others items. I think that's pretty neat compared to the norm of using third parties to manage the trade, or doing it purely on a trust basis.
> I don’t think I’m understanding this right. Is the game open source?
Parts are open source but not the majority of the game.
> What’s the asset that’s decoupled from the game? The ownership data on the blockchain?
Yeah that's right, the cards themselves.
> If the game logic is not fork-able as well, I don’t see the value in forking the chain. It would be the equivalent to the Hearthstone team releasing the card art to the players once they shut down the game. But your collection will be lost as cards in the sense of gaming cards.
So this is sort of what I meant about forking the game. Because the data for the cards are off of the game you could use the assets themselves to create another version and keep ownership from the original game. I know this is a bit of a crazy idea but it is a possibility due to the decoupling of game and state. This was more in response to someone else who said that this was a Ponzi scheme as if the game servers shut down you'd lose your cards (which I don't agree with anyway, because it's a game - not an investment strategy lol, but I was just thinking about that when I wrote this).
As a strongman: The reason the new developer would do that is community goodwill, and that is a strong argument. The blockchain record of those NFTs is a strong guarantee that the card ownership database is published, so that you can, as a playerbase, import that ownership db later. That same strong guarantee can be accomplished with any Merkle Tree of card ownership transactions, i.e. you could format the card DB in git, and publish it publicly, and achieve the same end result.
I mean you could but there's some intangible value of having original items right? It's why you see those APE NFTs selling a dumb amount of money but all the clones since have failed - it's not just having something, but having an authentic something. In my spare time I volunteer at the Cantor Arts Museum in Stanford and there's a collection of sculptures by Rodin. Originally the rule was that any piece created from his cast was an 'Original' however it flooded the market, so the French government built 8 pieces from his casts after he died and dubbed those the "Original" pieces. You could have one from a different set but the value in the art market is far less. My point is if you flood the market with copies it might not effect the value of the OG cards as you'd expect, much like Gen 4 Pickachu cards don't cost as much as a Gen 1 does.
I appreciate the strongman argument, it's nice to see that take on HN regarding crypto :)
To address it, yes you're right that you could do the exact same thing by building a Merkle Tree of card ownership from the games DB. However, these aren't original assets anymore, but replacements. Technically they'd act the same in the game but they'd be more prone to 'flooded copies'. You'd also have to get the company to agree to do that release, rather than being able to do it as a userbase instead. With trading card games people like to own exclusive cards and I think that attitude can be seen with NFTs today. Hell, even if the game did fail the trading market could still exist (do you think Logan Paul actually plays Pokemon with the cards he buys for 100k+? Maybe, but I didn't play as a kid and don't know many who did!).
No, you can't. No, you won't. Card assets and all the data describing their actual behaviour in the game isn't stored on chain. Because stroing anything on chain is prohibitively expensive. So, if/when devs kill Gods Unchained, all assets will be gone, and you will be left with links to non-existing urls in your NFTs.
Edit: also, as someone else pointed out: those rights to those assets will likely belong to original authors, so you can't do anything with them without clear explicit permission.
NFTs add the ability to do non-custodial trading. You can trade items for money without needing to first hand them over to some random marketplace.