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Its excitingly easy to imagine a Ready Player One-like metaverse that could only exist thanks to NFTs. The set of iron plate iron I wear is expressed as a cryptographically-verifiable token within the game's world, which is itself powered by a connected network of peer-to-peer servers. Don't imagine Fortnite. Imagine Counter Strike. Old Counter Strike, back in the day, when Valve never ran any servers, and you had your Favorites list of the best community servers, the same crowd of people showing up every evening to play. Thousands of these servers existed. Valve produced the game, and (most of) the code these servers ran. But, they were ultimately independent entities; many would re-skin players, or have custom weapons, or even custom physics engines. These items were cool. But they were ephemeral; they didn't have any intrinsic value. So, Valve added Official weapon skins, and the Steam marketplace where they could be purchased and sold. They "christened" the providence of these digital items (and, of course, produced many of them). Now, imagine Valve's christening of that item isn't necessary. The alternatives you outline look more like "how our world works today, with linear extrapolation". It's a recipe for further centralization of control into entities like Nintendo and Facebook. Yes, if Nintendo built a "metaverse" they'd run a MySQL database in a data center in Oregon that registered your ownership of some cool weapon skin; but what does a world look like where not only you and I can run servers for people to play on, independent of Nintendo, but where the concept of ownership of valuable digital items is still maintained, and a vibrant economy can exist in the exchange of these items? Blockchain tech is truly a "have your cake and eat it too" situation in this regard. Valve's argument is that, yeah public servers are awesome, but their authority is necessary in this marketplace of weapon skins existing. Most gaming companies aren't even this open; their authority is necessary in both the marketplace, and servers (think: Fortnite). Blockchain tech says that none of that is necessary; the role of the game developer is to "set the stage". This also has the potential to significantly change how developers are compensated. Valve takes XX% of every steam marketplace transaction (not to mention, the disgusting loot crate system they helped to pioneer). It's a tax on every transaction in the network, which acts as a negative force against usage of the network. Reframe this to the dev's only significant role being to "set the stage"; they invent the currency that is used to make these transactions, so their compensation is in owning a large amount of this currency (what they don't distribute). Now, their compensation is in growth-in-value of the currency; proof of stake! This is a positive force; their compensation goes up when more people value the currency. |