They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.
I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game.
If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
The system as described doesnt 'break down' if that transfer doesnt relay to in game, it never launched whatsoever.
I dont know what would be in it for developers to tie into such a system - unregulated video game markets are notorious for the scams they breed (don't believe me? Meet me in Thais depot for some fast hands), so ceding control so that a secondary market can spring up sounds.. counterproductive.
I don't know why you started your sentence with "No". What you describe is exactly the same as buying the name of a star, except it's on blockchain instead of some kind of database.
If you like, you can write code to associate the ownership of that star (by access whichever star registry institution you like) to some game feature. Or you can let the player submit a "star ownership certfication. It's just the same except the data source is decentralized.
Right now I dont think there is a programmatic way to do that with star certificates. I guess I dont see what your point is - are you just trying to link two things that seem frivolous to you?
You buy "something". That "something" doesn't represent any legal right for you. If you buy a NFT of an image, you won't be the copyright owner of that image. You can't stop other people from using it either. Maybe there are some exceptions, but generally you just don't get anything legally. Similarly, buying a star doesn't give you legal right on that star.
Why does doing this programatically make it different? Plus, buying a star is not inherently non-programmable. You can launch a star registry with an API. You can laucnh an NFT for stars. What makes buying a star stupid is that it doesn't represent any legal right, not that it's doesn't scale.
The hypothetical under examination here is if I built a system that used NFT ownership as ownership of some in game thing - it represents a promise to value a given token, which is wholly different from the star thing (they dont value that certificate in a meaningful way). If your first instinct is to launch into a tirade about how dumb that is then great - total agreement. But, you could build it and it would work, and it would be meaningfully different from star ownership certificates.
In my hypothetical game I can enforce that relationship. Lets say the game is pokemon except with scorpions, and each scorpemon is represented as an NFT. Your wallet contents then determine what scorpemon you can play with.
Does that make sense?
They can do that research as part of PhD dissertations.
Maybe eventually we'll put things like deeds on-chain as NFTs. This would have the benefit of decentralizing the record-keeping power, so we wouldn't have to worry about failure of some central authority in this regard.
Enforcement of these ownership rights will probably depend on some centralized power, but if the deeper record-keeping layer becomes decentralized, is that not a win?
I can print a copy of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't devalue the original painting.
For now, you’ll have to settle for a court system and copyright law.
All the digital ownership stuff is whack funny money low rates bullshit. That usecase for it is a concession that the copyright industry got it right, which is obviously not the case. NFTs just don't have the muscle to prop themselves up like Copyright does.
Do we, though?
/shrug