>If WoW and Runescape are already collaborating, they can just ask each other who owns what This is actually not that trivial from a technical standpoint and t

>If WoW and Runescape are already collaborating, they can just ask each other who owns what This is actually not that trivial from a technical standpoint and takes a lot of time and money to maintain. First Runescape would need to set up and hire a team to maintain uptime on a few public facing web service servers and define an item status API. They'd need to integrate this web service into their backend infrastructure to give live updates. Second World of Warcraft would need to write some custom code to read these party hats and their owners from the Runescape API and also maintain a way to link Runescape and World of Warcraft accounts so the right people get them (OAuth2 would likely do well here). WoW would also likely need to design the system to fail gracefully when Runescape servers are down. This is just for read access, if WoW wanted to let players trade these hats then the Runescape API at least doubles in size and now includes synchrony assumptions and complexity in case players try to trade at the same time in both games. Not fun. Alternatively Runescape could just make party hats NFTs and players would hold them in their own wallets. WoW would write a handful of lines of standardized code to read the NFTs from the player's wallets and display them in game. Allowing users to trade these items would also just be a few lines of code and would work seamlessly across these two (or more) games. Ethereum also has 100% uptime and the reliability allows designers to create a simpler system overall. It's the difference between weeks/months and a few days of work on the development side. It's also more standardized and compatible with all other apps when using ERC-721.