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I don't really think of that proposed use case the way you are presenting it there -- I think of it more as, there will be a massive public cache of items, available to buy and sell on a neutral marketplace like OpenSea, which only one user can hold at a time, that game developers can bring in-game if they so choose. The implementation details would be unique to each game, and driven by demand of the NFT holders, so maybe some would be better in one game than in another. And I'm not some NFT zealot by the way. I just think the way you're presenting that use case is quite a strawman. You're saying the companies have to agree to a bunch of stuff, but they don't, and that's the whole potential imo -- each can pick and choose how and if they want to bring a given NFT in-game. Walking through your points -- - Rival companies have to agree to integration at a deep level -- they both have to independently decide to support a given NFT type, yes, but they don't have to agree with each other about how it's integrated. For instance, one might allow you to don your armor purely for aesthetics, whereas the other might add some performance advantage for owning it. - They have to share asset formats -- not true -- the original NFT might point to some image, but each game could simply verify token ownership, and have their own assets representing it. Loot, for instance, is just text on a background. There's a lot of room for creativity in interpreting how those text descriptions might be implemented. - Issues of balance have to be shared -- not true -- because each game could balance and implement the item the way they choose. And again, the base case could be a pure aesthetic implementation. - They have to add deep blockchain integration -- I don't follow your point there -- they certainly would have to call the chain to verify NFT ownership, but again, they don't have to agree how to represent the items. - Exchange rate -- isn't that the point of a public market like OpenSea? The market is already there, bidding and offering every day. - Billionaires paying to win -- who's to say some games wouldn't invert what you'd expect so that common NFTs can actually keep up alongside rares, or even have advantages over them? Maybe in pitting a mob of commons against the rares, for instance. Again, this introduces more possible choice for players -- if some company today breaks their game mechanics to favor pay to win, you don't have a way to move your existing investment in that game anywhere else. Whereas if frustration grows with some popular NFT game, a competitor could come along with better balance and eat their lunch. |
Eventually you'll have a handful of big NFT companies whose entire purpose is to manage the hat economy, because if you throw the door open to any old NFT, you immediately tank the scarcity that keeps it running. But since we have to trust a handful of big NFT companies anyway, they can now just bring the data about who owns which hat in-house and provide an API to every game that wants to interoperate. RIP the blockchain.