[mattbrewsbytes]

NFT's applied to real world things or stuff like video clips does seem kinda silly. You are right, NFT seems geared towards things with no redeeming value whatsoever ... in the real world. Video games have had the concept of tokens for decades and those even have printed on them that they aren't redeemable. That is why NFT and video games are a perfect combination, possibly industry changing.

Think of it in terms of an operating arcade. A video game NFT is like a special physical token only you can own (or maybe limited numbers of them) and when you drop it into a game, it gives you a unique item, exchanges for currency in-game, etc. If this is what GameStop is doing, they could be the backbone for all of this - the token machine at the arcade. Or the token machine for every arcade.

I think NFT might become a marketable term for things that aren't an actual crypto currency but use blockchain simply because there is a lot to unpack and understand to explain to someone like a grandma. Some possible uses based on my limited understanding of NFT's/blockchain:

- Revenue sharing of second hand digital games with developers. If a game purchase is an NFT and gets resold, my understanding is there is the possibility for royalties to go back to the original owner. This would make second-hand games a very profitable business for GameStop and game developers.

- Novelty/Collectibles - say a sports star purchases a digital game as an NFT, sells it at auction for charity and now someone gets to own the single copy of that game that sports star owned, with a one of a kind in-game item.

- In-game currencies, cross platform, cross-game. You have a stack of tokens usable across anything. Kinda like old school arcades. Yeah that's not NFT more of a wallet concept, again think of NFT as a marketing concept.

- Verifyable leaderboards, speedrun records, esports trophies.

[duped]

If I own the arcade I can authenticate tokens in amortized constant time with a centralized ledger. It's also private so I don't leak details of my tokens to anyone, including my customers and competitors.

If I have a decentralized ledger I can authenticate tokens in (at least) linear time with the total number of tokens I have ever distributed. The ledger is also public so competing arcades know intimate details of my business. In some cases they might even know which games are most popular. My customers will also know the relative scarcity of tokens and how much they should be valued, potentially limiting my profits.

Why should I use a decentralized ledger for my arcade?

[mattbrewsbytes]

If you are thinking of it as a game store like Steam, then broaden that thought to include in-game collectibles, currencies, character skins, etc. You'd want a public, transparent marketplace for players to buy/sell/trade based on whatever public value people assign to those items.

NFT's provide a mechanism (as I understand it) for royalties to creators. If this is implemented for games, then second-hand sales are entirely possible for a digital game. I don't think that's possible today.

I don't know that centralized/decentralized matters much to gamers, I would imagine most users would be signing into a web site with an account that manages all of that behind the scenes.

[duped]

> NFT's provide a mechanism (as I understand it) for royalties to creators. If this is implemented for games, then second-hand sales are entirely possible for a digital game. I don't think that's possible today.

There's nothing preventing this today, and nothing NFTs solve that would force those features to be supported. It can be done with a centralized ledger (a database hosted by the marketplace implementer, like Steam). I don't see the incentives for the marketplace platform to implement itself in terms of NFTs.

However, I could see game developers and gamers have uses for NFTs using a decentralized ledger to cut out the marketplace vendors from the transactions (or requiring transactions take place only on their systems).

[himinlomax]

None of these applications seem to benefit significantly from cryptocurrency, and the technical/security issues are orthogonal to it.

[NoSorryCannot]

I can see the business appeal of the prospect of being able to skim off the top of second hand sales while maintaining a thread of DRM enforcement along the way, but it's pretty cynical and at the expense of consumers.

Most other uses, like whether some particular series of bits have been blessed by a particular person and to the benefit of whom, seem to already have been solved by the nonrepudiation of digital signatures.

It appears to me that the distributed and public properties of the block chain are not being used for good here.

[Can_Not]

> being able to skim off the top of second hand sales

Steam's current strategy of "no second hand sales" (but better sales and distribution instead) really beats anything NFT has to offer and doesn't require forcing a blockchain and mintinv fees into the scenario.

[NoSorryCannot]

If they wanted people to be able to resell titles while taking a cut, they could easily facilitate that now. Why would Valve turn to NFTs to solve that problem?