NFTs. It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control to ban anyone. It lets you safely make trades without having to pass your items to sites for them to hold on to your items for you.
The state of any particular blockchain doesn't confer any copyrights, license, or real world ownership. It's about as valid as me writing "I own a pair of Air Jordans" on an index card.
Unless a game developer decides to honor any particular blockchain and NFTs on it those NFTs mean nothing. There's no upside to a developer honoring third party NFTs because they make no money off them but do have support and development costs.
Also, something like OpenSea can block you and you're effectively banned for all practical purposes.
If it's a blockchain, there's no single host who can do that.
...and without payment processing, fraud detection, customer service, moderation tools, user reviews or a refund policy.
Eg. the rest is optional and doesn't come with the same guarantees as the base network.
I don't hate cryptocurrency personally, but it's not hard to see how 99% of users would prefer "the rest" implemented well over a properly transparent blockchain.
For example, if it’s a game item, you still rely on one or more games to honour your NFT that claims you own it, and to implement that item in the first place. If it’s an image, that image is still hosted somewhere (and even if it’s embedded into the NFT directly, those bits are given meaning externally).
An NFT is just a receipt claiming ownership, what that receipt allows you to do still relies on external services honouring that receipt.
NFTs only solve one small part of the puzzle and I’d argue it’s not even the most important one.
A certificate saying that you own the moon can not be a bond. NFTs are much more versatile.
For it to truly destroy the monopoly, the items that the NFTs represent would have to stand on their own, outside of any particular platform, implemented entirely in the NFT smart contract itself, but outside of the most trivial use cases (eg displaying an image) that’s not a technology that exists as platforms would have to at a minimum agree on a standard interface and functionality of items. Right now, it’s also held back by storage and transaction costs (although some blockchains are cheaper than others).
But even then, if there was a common item standard and you could use that to somehow implement cross platform (or cross game or whatever) items, any particular platform could still decide not to honour it or to ban you or whatever they want.
NFTs "in games" is just laughable. It's a perfect microcosm of how crypto boosters NEVER know anything about what they are talking about, like even the most basic, first sentence of wikipedia things.
There is no system agnostic way to program videogame object behavior. Your NFT can pretend to have whatever functionality it wants, but it's up to the game dev to honor that. If your NFT is a jpeg that you want as a weapon skin, the game dev has to take that blockchain data and pull or parse the jpeg out of it, and there is NOTHING the blockchain can do to enforce that. There's NO cryptography protecting that jpeg after that moment.
And that's just the physical, technical implementation, completely ignoring that it won't get to that step because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.
Or do you somehow actually think EA and Ubisoft and everyone put pay to win mechanics in their games because players are desperate to give them more cash?
>NFTs "in games" is just laughable
Microtransactions and in game economies already exist. Moving that economy to a blockchain is not laughable. If a developer doesn't want to spend development time working on features for the in game economy they can use the cryptocurrency ecosystem to accelerate their project.
>because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.
If you think microtransactions are not a way for game studios to get quick cash you are misleading yourself.