I find it hard to see much of a serious case for NFTs, but I mostly agree with what you're saying. Even if it is a "schadenfreude generator," Amazon's attempts at having third-party sales on their site with "zshops" were a laughing stock until they weren't.
We’re seeing only the first iteration of NFTs. Gaming can be interesting. Like if WoW had some unique Legendaries in NFT form I think that would be interesting and lucrative. I’m not sure if the incentive is there for existing games because you’re giving away control of the economy. But for upstarts they can use this as a way to get players to try their game instead since you could maybe sell some of the items for real money one day
What on earth does the NFT part add here? WoW can add unique, auctionable items at any time using their existing tech. It's already a centralised platform, so decentrilisation doesn't add much...
A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!
Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!
But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.
You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.
But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?
It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).
Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in video games is pretty easily analogized to something people have already tried and failed at in video games or something people currently do in video games more efficiently without NFT. And it seems the people entering the space, rather than study what works or doesn't, start from the premise that they read a novel that described something they thought was cool and then trying to blue sky that in video games.
>A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!
As the article points out this is a dumb idea that doesn't make any sense. You could port an ownership token from one game to the next, but the receiving game has to implement some semantics for that item that are completely divorced from the originating game anyway.
Yeah and once you have built all this cross-platform integration and standardisation between the game companies involved….
They’ll find it’s easier to just use a centralised database they collectively run or contract out or whatever. The whole idea of putting the “ownership records” on a public blockchain doesn’t help the system work at all and adds a ton of complexity (not to mention environmental concerns).
> But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"
Another possibility is mapping everything to a limited set of items. So like, I can bring over any of my golf clubs from PGA Tour 2K12 to Grand Theft Auto, but they all just map to a generic "golf club" I can beat people up with. But this isn't very compelling after the first couple times someone tries it.
Counter-Strike GO skins are non-fungible. In that they have different float value of wear parameter and in some cases texture placement.
In the end that really doesn't matter, each version for same weapon is listed under few categories. And for players it mostly doesn't matter which one they pick. So even in the case we have good example what non-fungibility is, it really does not matter much.
Agreed with all of that but just thought I’d point out the non-fungibility is of the token itself not the actual content it points to. So you’d be able to sell non-fungible tokens for access to the same content. Companies still wouldn’t because doing that inserts a lot of complexity you don’t need rather than using a normal storefront model.
That's really my question with almost everything related to crypto, "what is decentralization actually adding here?" It's cool, I guess, but it's wasteful.
The only argument I've heard is the ability to transfer items between games, but that leads me to more questions than answers.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings.
Games already allow transfers in some cases - and usually in the exact opposite of decentralized - for example Nintendo and their Amibo or Pokémon with loading previous generation saves.
