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by 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"
1 comments
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 1931 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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