Without "luring players with profit" isn't it just a video game? What makes it web3? What features require a blockchain?
> he admitted that building this interoperable ecosystem, which he sees as the future of video games overall, doesn’t technically require blockchain technology at all.
>
> “Blockchain is just the way that it’s going to happen, I think, because there’s a lot of cultural momentum around people equating blockchain with openness and trusting things that are decentralized on the blockchain.”
(actually I think he's understating the case here, representing ownership is a real use case for blockchains)
I guess the argument boils down to "it's web3 because it has blockchain, and it has blockchain because that's a good marketing buzzword." Which, fair enough, I guess. That could be right.
Blockchain-backed or not, I think it's pretty unlikely that a bunch of competing game companies are going to come up with a system that lets you share items between games. That sounds technically and politically very hard, and for not a lot of benefit.
And even if it is, why would we need The Blockchain to solve it?
The bigger question is to whom will customers pay for a skin that works in multiple games.
If they'll pay to the first game where they bought that skin, then that's a strong incentive for most games to prevent this from working and avoid or disrupt the ecosystem, because they would rather have the player re-buy the same skin on their platform (i.e. "this thing will allow free transfer of skins from A to B" is a property that works against the proposal, not for it)
If they'll pay to every game, then the blockchain solution needs to solve that very difficult problem of revenue allocation between all the stakeholders, ensuring that every company involved feels certain that they'll be able to extract a revenue stream from the process, instead of being permissionless, full ownership of your items, etc.