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> Can I use it as an in-game item? I don't know why people are so obsessed with this idea of in game items as NFTs. It's a terrible idea. Games have no reason

> Can I use it as an in-game item? I don't know why people are so obsessed with this idea of in game items as NFTs. It's a terrible idea. Games have no reason to be decentralized. All of the information can be stored on the company's servers, like an MMO, or if it's not critical to maintain scarcity, locally on devices without the whole network, like pokemon (the pokemon themselves, which can be traded and such). You can't reasonably expect games from other companies to implement the same NFT scheme. That's just not how games work. A longsword in dnd is not a longsword in final fantasy, nor is it a longsword in dark souls, nor is it a longsword in minecraft. And even if it were, why the fuck would you want scarcity on longswords? 99% of all items in any game are typically very easy to obtain, with a few rare things standing out, and with a natural progression built in. What would it even mean to bring your 50 hour investment in a top tier perfectly slotted jrpg omni magic blue elemental Atk+++ Spd+++ Crt+++ Mag--- weapon to a game like call of duty? Even if we're just talking about a single game universe, like a dnd setting. Maybe there's now 3 baldurs gate games, for some reason not designed by the same company, but all willing to share the same exact item spec. Where is this concept useful, still? Can I bring my +10 longsword (a big deal) to the beginning of the game and just trivialize the singleplayer mode? Is it more of a multiplayer thing so we want real world wealth and status to be the primary driver of character strength?

thesuitonym 5y ago
>why the fuck would you want scarcity on longswords? You would want scarcity on longswords if your business model included selling loot crates that may contain longswords.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  If your business model included selling loot, you would not allow NFTs from other companies from which you earn nothing. And if the token is from a previous game of your own company, you can again just use a database without all the complexity.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Exactly. If you need longswords to be scarce, you're going to have a bad time when marty minecraft builds 1,000 longswords and wants to bring them into your game.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The complexity of a NFT system provides a benefit to the company by (A) offloading processing power to people who might be making some money from 'mining' the chain, and (B) not having to run your own marketplace system, while still getting a percentage of TX fees.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      If people are mining it, then the processing power required has just gone up by multiple orders of magnitude and is now vulnerable to third parties controlling the mining.
imownbey 5y ago
Two things you are missing is: 1. With NFTs games can take a cut of resales. With something like cs:go there was a substantial secondary resale market for things like skins, which valve wasn’t able to capture but with NFTs they could have taken say 10% of each resale. 2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite. In the tech world we are always talking about how valuable data is. The blockchain makes that data public so secondary products can exist to serve needs the game doesn’t care about. And provides the ability for the original game to capture part of that market if they wish because they own the initial contract. But because the data is public, other games can also use that data how they want.
- spiderice 5y ago
  > With NFTs games can take a cut of resales How is this a positive? Where were the people begging GameStop to write publishers a check for the used games they bought and resold?
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    They didn't say it was a positive for users. But users aren't the ones who are going to add NFTs to games. Penny Arcade explains: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/12/22/ubisoft https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/12/22/ubisoft
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > 1. With NFTs games can take a cut of resales. With something like cs:go there was a substantial secondary resale market for things like skins, which valve wasn’t able to capture but with NFTs they could have taken say 10% of each resale. So what is EA's incentive to join the Valve blockchain where Valve gets 10% of each resale? And if there's no incentive for EA to join, why isn't it just a centralized marketplace rather than a blockchain? > 2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite. Valve and other companies already have this data, in much greater specificity than "this wallet owns a longsword".
alkonaut 5y ago
Wait, you are making this much too complicated. I think if you take a step back and realize that the industry of hats in games that have zero effect except being cosmetic is enormous. Don't ask me why - I think anyone who pays actual money for an in-game cosmetic item is a fool, but that's beside the point. But now imagine if 10 different AAA game studios realize that they can create a market in which people instead of paying $5 for a hat or $1 for a loot box with 10% chance of finding a hat-they pay $100 for a hat NFT and $10 of that is a transaction fee to the studio. They pay $100 for it, because a) it will work across games and b) it might be worth $10k tomorrow. The studios can take a cut on each transfer, instead of just one fee! So these studios just scaled up their hat business a lot and all they had to do was agree to honor the hat ledger which says that only the hat's rightful owners can wear the hats. There is obviously no problem moving the hats between different games (A purely cosmetic thing is pretty easy to implement). The fact that the honoring of the NFTs is still voluntary from the studios, that it's just as centralized as ever, and that it might disappear the day the studios no longer make money from this is of course lost on the hat buyers. The tokens are extremely fungible.
- sparsely 5y ago
  Why would they run this as an NFT though. They're going to want control over what assets can be added, and TBH would probably much rather they could do something about theft, money laundering etc to avoid bad publicity.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    > Why would they run this as an NFT though. Imagine you had a set of digital drawings of apes you wanted to sell. What can you charge for a nice colurful drawing of an ape? $1? Now add "NFT" to the description. Same with a hat. The studios would do this because they see a situation in which a few of their assets become $10M ape assets and they make $100k. Before this hype dies down, the studios are afraid of missing out on it. No studio wants to be the one that missed the golden rain of NFT hats of 2023 because they didn't get on the hype train. of course this won't be a long term thing. But we'll see land grabs like these now for a while because it's a low risk/high reward kind of thing.
ruste 5y ago
This is close but not quite how I expect they'll come to be used. I think they'll become a lot more important if companies like Meta are successful in creating virtual connected spaces based on open standards. In that scenario, with public buy in, ownership of a digital work shifts meaning slightly to one where NFTs suddenly make more sense.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Biggest issue with some 'use your item as an avatar in any game' is that doing cross-engine models is hard, and pretty much impossible if you want the model itself to be immutable, lest it break with some engine update rendering it useless. The only in game item thing that really works is when the game code has a texture algorithm (like CS:GO skin variants/wear levels) and uses the immutable nft data to calculate their unique item texture.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    It's not just technically laughable, cross-game assets make zero sense from a design and aesthetic standpoint. Splatoon and Gears of War are both third-person shooters, but characters in one would look jarring and hilariously out of place in the other.
depaya 5y ago
I think Minecraft is an interesting game to bring up since multiplayer in this game exists in a very decentralized way. Anybody can host a server and your possessions (etc) on that sever are completely unrelated to other servers. One could imagine some sort of opt-in system that servers could enable that would allow for cosmetic items to travel with a player from server to server using NFTs as proof of ownership of the cosmetics. There isn't a real reason for this to be done with NFTs vs some centralized database, but it does make more sense than the vast majority of games with are hosted on centralized systems already.
- plainnoodles 5y ago
  There is also a real reason for it not to be done with NFTs: it would take about thirty seconds for someone to be scammed and open a support ticket with [whoever - it won't be the right person, but I guarantee someone is getting a support ticket] and they obviously won't be able to reverse the transaction, and also unclear if they could even ban the scammer (right now, bans are per-server, unless server owners have coordinated otherwise, which they generally don't). Regardless, the user is going to have a bad time, versus a system using a mutable system, where a human could investigate and reverse the issue. Obviously support agents make mistakes sometimes too, but that's a heck of a lot rarer than scams in MMOs.
  - depaya 5y ago
    This exact point has been my hesitation with NFTs in general. I think the immutable nature of NFTs is actually very incompatible with human nature; we make mistakes and a completely unforgiving system is only going to make life harder.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > There isn't a real reason for this to be done with NFTs vs some centralized database That's like the main point...
  - depaya 5y ago
    Well my point is that Minecraft does actually feature some decentralization vs the vast majority of online games.
Levitz 5y ago
I'd argue that Nintendo kind of does this already with Amiibo. You own a figurine you purchased and by scanning it you verify the ownership, which yields a reward exclusive to owners, the tech behind it is different but the concept is very similar, including the fact that you can resell figurines and that some can get to be very expensive because of supply and demand. I'd also argue that this feature is lackluster and I don't think it would have had any success at all if it wasn't for the fact that you also get a figurine.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  There are many reasons why amiibo are not like NFTs, but I'm only interested in trashing this "in-game item NFT" idea. When you scan Mario, you have no expectation of instantiating mario into your game, because that would be stupid in just about every context. Smash AI aside. There is an Epona Link one that instantiates Epona into breath of the wild, but it definitely doesn't do that in Mario Odyssey. Amiibo are cool. People like them because they're cool and the in game bonuses are a fun little extra. That's very different from the idea of trading in game item NFTs with the intention of carrying over their utility to other games.
  - isk517 5y ago
    Nintendo completely owns Amiibo and doesn't see the value in coding the same effect for each Amiibo into, why would any developer want to put in the work to implement items they didn't create and profit from?
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Exactly
  - Levitz 5y ago
    You have an expectation that NFTs would surely instantiate objects, I see no reason for that. Moreover I see no motivation for game companies to keep support. Imagine you have an NFT for, say, a gun, let's go with AK47 because of its popularity, and say it unlocks it for the current Call of Duty (whatever that is now). Why would Activision make it work with the next CoD? Is it supposed to work with Battlefield too? Is there anything stopping people at Valve from giving you a cosmetic if you validate it, if they so desire?
koonsolo 5y ago
For indie games however, it could make sense. Hear me out. It's true that items are unique to games. But if you want to allow some kind of trading, you will have to implement it yourself (next to programming, art, marketing, etc.). Linking this to crypto-tokens could have the benefit that you outsource the trading part. Your players "own" their items through crypto tokens, and can trade them on crypto exchanges. You can implement it yourself in a centralised way of course. But the question is if you want to spend the resources on that.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  But why. The source of the drop would be some centralised server anyway. Adding crypto assets seems way more programmer work than doing in game trading, which you would want anyway as a player.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  So an indie dev is going to spend the time to create an interface between Stardew Valley and Slay the Spire cards? It's a huge undertaking that would need to be custom done for each game's data it interacts with. And indie games are less likely to conform to standards than others.
  - drks91 5y ago
    Yep. Indie devs will spend god knows how many hours and their tight budgets building a cutting edge revolutionary tech, so amazing that will be able to render unknown items with unknown specifications on the fly. All that just for some random investment genius recoup the money that he spent buying a ugly monkey jpeg.
- emmp 5y ago
  Indie developers typically want to design, well, their own game. Their own vision, art, music, mechanics working in concert. I don't think anyone is dreaming of creating a showroom for a bunch of random other assets out there in the world. Asset-store flips are already considered jokes. Original, boutique art in an indie game will always win out and stand out. They'd still need to do the work to implement every single item you are talking about. No indie would even want to do that. Nobody goes indie to work on compatibility drudge-work. Maybe if they are trying to jump on get-rich-quick financialization trend, but not if they want to actually work on their art.
daniel-cussen 5y ago
> That's just not how games work. A longsword in dnd is not a longsword in final fantasy, nor is it a longsword in dark souls, nor is it a longsword in minecraft. That's not a terrible idea. Crossovers between games. Good gimmick. And a lot of what you're talking about is culturally constructed, it doesn't have to be that way.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Crossovers are fine. That's not the issue being noted here. The problem is that people imagine generic items are cross compatible within many games, but that just doesn't work. If you want to make a crossover version of the master sword in minecraft, sure, that's cool. If you want to somehow import the data and just assume some sort of parser will get the properties and the look and feel right, you're going to have a shit time. And then still you'd be better off on a centralized setting.
jdmichal 5y ago
Please correct anything below: There's a couple points: low- vs high-trust, and distributed vs centralized. Blockchains have in turn two mechanisms to match: proof-of-work to handle low-trust environments, and public cryptographic ledgers to handle distributed work. In this case, games are high-trust, centralized services. There is a single controller that authoritatively owns the current game state. So this does not seem a good match for blockchain technology. If you're not in a low-trust environment, you don't need proof-of-X. You just a public cryptographic ledger written to by a set of trusted keys. Any party can extend the blockchain by just creating and signing the next block. (Would need some contention resolution for simultaneous write attempts -- could be as simple as whoever got the lower signature hash wins.)

thesuitonym 5y ago

>why the fuck would you want scarcity on longswords? You would want scarcity on longswords if your business model included selling loot crates that may contain longswords.

MagnumOpus 5y ago
If your business model included selling loot, you would not allow NFTs from other companies from which you earn nothing. And if the token is from a previous game of your own company, you can again just use a database without all the complexity.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Exactly. If you need longswords to be scarce, you're going to have a bad time when marty minecraft builds 1,000 longswords and wants to bring them into your game.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The complexity of a NFT system provides a benefit to the company by (A) offloading processing power to people who might be making some money from 'mining' the chain, and (B) not having to run your own marketplace system, while still getting a percentage of TX fees.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    If people are mining it, then the processing power required has just gone up by multiple orders of magnitude and is now vulnerable to third parties controlling the mining.

imownbey 5y ago

Two things you are missing is: 1. With NFTs games can take a cut of resales. With something like cs:go there was a substantial secondary resale market for things like skins, which valve wasn’t able to capture but with NFTs they could have taken say 10% of each resale. 2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite. In the tech world we are always talking about how valuable data is. The blockchain makes that data public so secondary products can exist to serve needs the game doesn’t care about. And provides the ability for the original game to capture part of that market if they wish because they own the initial contract. But because the data is public, other games can also use that data how they want.

spiderice 5y ago
> With NFTs games can take a cut of resales How is this a positive? Where were the people begging GameStop to write publishers a check for the used games they bought and resold?
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  They didn't say it was a positive for users. But users aren't the ones who are going to add NFTs to games. Penny Arcade explains: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/12/22/ubisoft https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2021/12/22/ubisoft
spywaregorilla 5y ago
> 1. With NFTs games can take a cut of resales. With something like cs:go there was a substantial secondary resale market for things like skins, which valve wasn’t able to capture but with NFTs they could have taken say 10% of each resale. So what is EA's incentive to join the Valve blockchain where Valve gets 10% of each resale? And if there's no incentive for EA to join, why isn't it just a centralized marketplace rather than a blockchain? > 2. Because the data is public it’s possible for other games to bootstrap off the data (we have seen this with “airdrops” in the crypto land). Meaning a game which is coming out can give some perk to people who own X in fortnite because they think their game is similar and want to entice people to try their game, especially people who they know like fortnite. Valve and other companies already have this data, in much greater specificity than "this wallet owns a longsword".

alkonaut 5y ago

Wait, you are making this much too complicated. I think if you take a step back and realize that the industry of hats in games that have zero effect except being cosmetic is enormous. Don't ask me why - I think anyone who pays actual money for an in-game cosmetic item is a fool, but that's beside the point. But now imagine if 10 different AAA game studios realize that they can create a market in which people instead of paying $5 for a hat or $1 for a loot box with 10% chance of finding a hat-they pay $100 for a hat NFT and $10 of that is a transaction fee to the studio. They pay $100 for it, because a) it will work across games and b) it might be worth $10k tomorrow. The studios can take a cut on each transfer, instead of just one fee! So these studios just scaled up their hat business a lot and all they had to do was agree to honor the hat ledger which says that only the hat's rightful owners can wear the hats. There is obviously no problem moving the hats between different games (A purely cosmetic thing is pretty easy to implement). The fact that the honoring of the NFTs is still voluntary from the studios, that it's just as centralized as ever, and that it might disappear the day the studios no longer make money from this is of course lost on the hat buyers. The tokens are extremely fungible.

sparsely 5y ago
Why would they run this as an NFT though. They're going to want control over what assets can be added, and TBH would probably much rather they could do something about theft, money laundering etc to avoid bad publicity.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  > Why would they run this as an NFT though. Imagine you had a set of digital drawings of apes you wanted to sell. What can you charge for a nice colurful drawing of an ape? $1? Now add "NFT" to the description. Same with a hat. The studios would do this because they see a situation in which a few of their assets become $10M ape assets and they make $100k. Before this hype dies down, the studios are afraid of missing out on it. No studio wants to be the one that missed the golden rain of NFT hats of 2023 because they didn't get on the hype train. of course this won't be a long term thing. But we'll see land grabs like these now for a while because it's a low risk/high reward kind of thing.

ruste 5y ago

This is close but not quite how I expect they'll come to be used. I think they'll become a lot more important if companies like Meta are successful in creating virtual connected spaces based on open standards. In that scenario, with public buy in, ownership of a digital work shifts meaning slightly to one where NFTs suddenly make more sense.

judge2020 5y ago
Biggest issue with some 'use your item as an avatar in any game' is that doing cross-engine models is hard, and pretty much impossible if you want the model itself to be immutable, lest it break with some engine update rendering it useless. The only in game item thing that really works is when the game code has a texture algorithm (like CS:GO skin variants/wear levels) and uses the immutable nft data to calculate their unique item texture.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  It's not just technically laughable, cross-game assets make zero sense from a design and aesthetic standpoint. Splatoon and Gears of War are both third-person shooters, but characters in one would look jarring and hilariously out of place in the other.

depaya 5y ago

I think Minecraft is an interesting game to bring up since multiplayer in this game exists in a very decentralized way. Anybody can host a server and your possessions (etc) on that sever are completely unrelated to other servers. One could imagine some sort of opt-in system that servers could enable that would allow for cosmetic items to travel with a player from server to server using NFTs as proof of ownership of the cosmetics. There isn't a real reason for this to be done with NFTs vs some centralized database, but it does make more sense than the vast majority of games with are hosted on centralized systems already.

plainnoodles 5y ago
There is also a real reason for it not to be done with NFTs: it would take about thirty seconds for someone to be scammed and open a support ticket with [whoever - it won't be the right person, but I guarantee someone is getting a support ticket] and they obviously won't be able to reverse the transaction, and also unclear if they could even ban the scammer (right now, bans are per-server, unless server owners have coordinated otherwise, which they generally don't). Regardless, the user is going to have a bad time, versus a system using a mutable system, where a human could investigate and reverse the issue. Obviously support agents make mistakes sometimes too, but that's a heck of a lot rarer than scams in MMOs.
- depaya 5y ago
  This exact point has been my hesitation with NFTs in general. I think the immutable nature of NFTs is actually very incompatible with human nature; we make mistakes and a completely unforgiving system is only going to make life harder.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
> There isn't a real reason for this to be done with NFTs vs some centralized database That's like the main point...
- depaya 5y ago
  Well my point is that Minecraft does actually feature some decentralization vs the vast majority of online games.

Levitz 5y ago

I'd argue that Nintendo kind of does this already with Amiibo. You own a figurine you purchased and by scanning it you verify the ownership, which yields a reward exclusive to owners, the tech behind it is different but the concept is very similar, including the fact that you can resell figurines and that some can get to be very expensive because of supply and demand. I'd also argue that this feature is lackluster and I don't think it would have had any success at all if it wasn't for the fact that you also get a figurine.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
There are many reasons why amiibo are not like NFTs, but I'm only interested in trashing this "in-game item NFT" idea. When you scan Mario, you have no expectation of instantiating mario into your game, because that would be stupid in just about every context. Smash AI aside. There is an Epona Link one that instantiates Epona into breath of the wild, but it definitely doesn't do that in Mario Odyssey. Amiibo are cool. People like them because they're cool and the in game bonuses are a fun little extra. That's very different from the idea of trading in game item NFTs with the intention of carrying over their utility to other games.
- isk517 5y ago
  Nintendo completely owns Amiibo and doesn't see the value in coding the same effect for each Amiibo into, why would any developer want to put in the work to implement items they didn't create and profit from?
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Exactly
- Levitz 5y ago
  You have an expectation that NFTs would surely instantiate objects, I see no reason for that. Moreover I see no motivation for game companies to keep support. Imagine you have an NFT for, say, a gun, let's go with AK47 because of its popularity, and say it unlocks it for the current Call of Duty (whatever that is now). Why would Activision make it work with the next CoD? Is it supposed to work with Battlefield too? Is there anything stopping people at Valve from giving you a cosmetic if you validate it, if they so desire?

koonsolo 5y ago

For indie games however, it could make sense. Hear me out. It's true that items are unique to games. But if you want to allow some kind of trading, you will have to implement it yourself (next to programming, art, marketing, etc.). Linking this to crypto-tokens could have the benefit that you outsource the trading part. Your players "own" their items through crypto tokens, and can trade them on crypto exchanges. You can implement it yourself in a centralised way of course. But the question is if you want to spend the resources on that.

rightbyte 5y ago
But why. The source of the drop would be some centralised server anyway. Adding crypto assets seems way more programmer work than doing in game trading, which you would want anyway as a player.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
So an indie dev is going to spend the time to create an interface between Stardew Valley and Slay the Spire cards? It's a huge undertaking that would need to be custom done for each game's data it interacts with. And indie games are less likely to conform to standards than others.
- drks91 5y ago
  Yep. Indie devs will spend god knows how many hours and their tight budgets building a cutting edge revolutionary tech, so amazing that will be able to render unknown items with unknown specifications on the fly. All that just for some random investment genius recoup the money that he spent buying a ugly monkey jpeg.
emmp 5y ago
Indie developers typically want to design, well, their own game. Their own vision, art, music, mechanics working in concert. I don't think anyone is dreaming of creating a showroom for a bunch of random other assets out there in the world. Asset-store flips are already considered jokes. Original, boutique art in an indie game will always win out and stand out. They'd still need to do the work to implement every single item you are talking about. No indie would even want to do that. Nobody goes indie to work on compatibility drudge-work. Maybe if they are trying to jump on get-rich-quick financialization trend, but not if they want to actually work on their art.

daniel-cussen 5y ago

> That's just not how games work. A longsword in dnd is not a longsword in final fantasy, nor is it a longsword in dark souls, nor is it a longsword in minecraft. That's not a terrible idea. Crossovers between games. Good gimmick. And a lot of what you're talking about is culturally constructed, it doesn't have to be that way.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
Crossovers are fine. That's not the issue being noted here. The problem is that people imagine generic items are cross compatible within many games, but that just doesn't work. If you want to make a crossover version of the master sword in minecraft, sure, that's cool. If you want to somehow import the data and just assume some sort of parser will get the properties and the look and feel right, you're going to have a shit time. And then still you'd be better off on a centralized setting.

jdmichal 5y ago

Please correct anything below: There's a couple points: low- vs high-trust, and distributed vs centralized. Blockchains have in turn two mechanisms to match: proof-of-work to handle low-trust environments, and public cryptographic ledgers to handle distributed work. In this case, games are high-trust, centralized services. There is a single controller that authoritatively owns the current game state. So this does not seem a good match for blockchain technology. If you're not in a low-trust environment, you don't need proof-of-X. You just a public cryptographic ledger written to by a set of trusted keys. Any party can extend the blockchain by just creating and signing the next block. (Would need some contention resolution for simultaneous write attempts -- could be as simple as whoever got the lower signature hash wins.)