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by jonwalch 1931 days ago
There's tens of millions of people that disagree with you regarding cosmetics in games. Gamers largely have disposable income and are happy that they can support their favorite game developers and look "cool" (show off their status) while doing it.
2 comments
whateveracct 1931 days ago
Cosmetics in games largely have value due to the game being online and multiplayer, which means NFTs aren't useful for them because there is already a central server to manage ownership.

They don't buy cosmetics just to show off their status, but to actually make their character look different when playing with a group of people who can see it. It's rarely "oh look - expensive" it's more "oh look - freaking Cowboy Ursa lmao"

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nikisweeting 1931 days ago
That will change when cosmetics can be shared across multiple games, which is already starting to grow with the onset of custom multi-game avatar+identity APIs being provided to game developers.

When you avatar persists across multiple different games, it makes sense to have an ownership mechanism that isn't managed by a single central authority.

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echelon 1930 days ago
What economic incentive to game developers have to respect NFT ownership? Or anyone, for that matter?

In VRChat, you can be any model.

If I had a game, I wouldn't care who owned the NFT. It's not a value add. As far as I'm concerned, anybody could use it.

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nikisweeting 1930 days ago
The incentive is that the players care about it, and players will actively choose games that respect their avatar/NFT ownership because it allows them to show off their prized avatar and share their persona with a larger audience.
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echelon 1930 days ago
Okay, but that doesn't mean companies will have economic incentive to support decentralization.

Games don't honor any fiat currency or stocks I hold, any unlocks I made on other platforms, or my Reddit upvotes.

This is going to go nowhere.

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nikisweeting 1929 days ago
Game platforms have been providing cross-game "unlocks" / achievements for years, and they're only moving more towards that (this is one of the whole reasons for Epic, Riot, etc. shipping their own launchers, it gives them a runtime on the client where they can securely share state between games).

It's going to be huge for VR in particular:

- https://www.roadtovr.com/getting-social-oculus-unifying-mult...

- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8845288

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Noos 1931 days ago
It's more or less a small amount of whales that can actually buy meaningful amounts of cosmetics though. Cosmetics and digital content are EXPENSIVE; for a person to get many we're talking thousands of dollars. $30 US mounts are easy to make, and incredible profit.

Even granting people who buy limited amounts to show support, its very easy to price them out of the market fast.

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