[Bombthecat]

I think the idea of nfts is cool, imagine star citizen where everyone could model ships and sell them as nft and set a counter of how many they sell (are available) the market should then set the value between work put in to design the ship, sell it and how many are available.

So juat like right now, you could buy a ship for 5 dollar, cheaply designed and thousands are available (or endless) or get a unique nice and good looking ship for ome thousand (or more?) because you need to pay the work of one guy for several days and its only one time available.

What get right now: bullshit, scams and everything controlled by the company selling the game.

[fattless]

I’ve always said that something like this could be a cool idea, but I don’t get why nft/blockchain is necessary. Speaking about the Ubisoft nft thing (because I understand it the best), Steam marketplace has been doing the same thing very well for years, offering a very similar expirence. Is there something I’m missing?

[kipchak]

The only downsides to to the Steam marketplace is it hasn't caught on very much outside of Valve's own titles, and you can only cash out to store credit, which has resulted in third party trading sites that run on top of the steam marketplace to emerge such as marketplace.tf, which relies on trusting the site not to swindle you. Both of those are fairly small issues, I think the trickier part is creating an environment/reason for anyone to care about the digital items that are for sale.

[fattless]

Agreed. These all seem like problems that can be solved somewhat easily, this seems like a problem that has been solved already and others are trying to cram blockchain into it. Like I said, could be totally missing something though.

[tasha0663]

> imagine star citizen where everyone could model ships and sell them as nft and set a counter of how many they sell (are available) the market should then set the value between work put in to design the ship, sell it and how many are available.

Uh, is that fun or am I back in economics class?

[83457]

Yes

[nest0r]

But why would I need NFTs for that?

[saurik]

NFTs (as defined by ERC721 or whatever it is) by and large end up acting as an interoperable standard that allows the assets to be traded on unified exchanges with assets from other games in a way that doesn't require any of the game developers to have to deal with money transmission issues (as they would only ever sell, not buy or facilitate trade).

Like in some sense all the NFT is to the game you develop is a minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about to trade it around and then anyone can provide the receipt back to your game later to be the potentially-new owner.

[verdverm]

The hard problem is how to use an asset in-game, beyond the visual aspect. What is the speed, rate of fire, etc.

Each game does this differently, their code is not the same, their assets are managed in many ways. How do you propose to deal with this?

[Bombthecat]

Like any rpg, but not for character creation, but for whatever?

[verdverm]

That process is very different for each game. Do you make them all use the same rules and mechanisms? What differentiates games then?

Have you tried to develop a game? It's much more complex than most applications. There are no standard libraries or APIs for this type of thing.

[lmm]

A few old RPGs tried to make it possible to import characters from the previous entry in the series. This generally didn't work very well, and those were first-party games; to do it for a third-party game seems a lot harder.

[danaris]

The Gold Box series of licensed D&D RPGs from SSI back in the early '90s actually did this quite well—you could create characters at level 1 in the first game in the series, and import them into each subsequent game intact except for the loss of a couple of game-specific magic items, all the way through the fourth entry (in the case of the Forgotten Realms series; the Krynn series only had 3 entries, but worked basically the same).

But this wasn't just the same company, it was, with some incremental modifications, the same game engine, and by the time the last entries came out, it was showing its age. There's no way you could have taken, say, a character—or even an item—from a completely different game like Ultima VI and turned it into an NFT that could then be added seamlessly into SSI's Secret of the Silver Blades. The two games, despite both being RPGs that came out the same year, are just so completely different that it wouldn't make any sense even if Origin and SSI did want to collaborate on making that possible.

[antifa]

As usual, NFTs have a lot of "these 2 circles will be an awesome owl" but the rest of the owl never gets drawn.

[vorpalhex]

We can't agree on what file format to use most of the time, nobody is going to make interoperable textures/models/etc between games.

NFTs would still be a "thing of value" and still be beholden to all the same rules as other things of value.

You still have AML issues.

[thebean11]

> nobody is going to make interoperable textures/models/etc between games

Unity / Unreal Engine asset stores are just that aren't they?

[vorpalhex]

And how often do you import those assets to find they don't work correctly in your game? That they need a different shader, renderer, lighting or additional configuration? How often do they fail to blend in with other prefabs?

[thebean11]

The cost to integrate them into a game certainly isn't zero, agree with you there

[tasha0663]

> an interoperable standard that allows the assets to be traded on unified exchanges with assets from other games in a way that doesn't require any of the game developers to have to deal with money transmission issues

FALSE. The assets from the games are not being traded in your hypothetical. The NFTs are.

> minimal external yet-trustable representation of the existence of some in-game asset

TRUE, BUT all it does is confirm someone calls dibs on something. Actually integrating those dibs in any sensible way is a huge task. It might be the "Deluxe Crystal AstroBlaster9000" in one game, but due to trademark issues, you might have to settle for "1 Ripe Banana" in another.

> so people can then go and use all of these systems you don't have to worry about

UNLIKELY. Developers would be one hashtag away from the Internet mob demanding they not allow people to use items pointed to by NFTs purchased with Dunning-Kruggerands that have dirty histories. The whitepapers might say you don't have to worry about it, but the users will.

Then there are security concerns. There will be a bad contract. There will be a phishing scam. The whitepaper might say code is law, but the users are still going to want the developer to make it right, or they'll walk.

[nest0r]

Why would any publisher do that? They make their profit on ingame marketplaces by taking a cut of the transaction it just doesn't make any sense.

[Bombthecat]

The publisher can take a cut from minting (creating an nft) and taking a cut from every sale, for example 30 percent first sale and then any other sale 10 percent.

[nest0r]

What would be difference between whaht they are doing now ie. Steam wihth cosmetics in csgo or tf2 and NFTs? It would only add overhead.

[thebean11]

Wouldn't it remove overhead? They don't need to develop or host the "auction house" or whatever it is.

[Bombthecat]

Nfts itself aren't the "game changer" the game changer is the combination of nfts and smart contracts, where various attributes are defined for the nfts, and they are not changeable.

In the steam marketplace, the developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.

[donmcronald]

It seems like all negatives IMO. How does a developer re-balance a game if they sold an NFT item that's game breaking? Do you upgrade every other NFT item to compensate? Who pays for that? Everything on the blockchain is a transaction, so who's going to pay for attribute changes? What if you want permanent damage on items so that pristine NFT items are more valuable? Who's going to pay the transaction fee to have their item tagged as damaged or destroyed or with any negative stat?

We already know in game items that affect gameplay basically ruin the game for anyone that isn't a whale. The NFT proponents think they can get everyone emotionally invested like the whales are, but good luck catering to the masses to keep them happy. It's only possible with whales because there aren't many of them and they're the largest source of revenue.

Once you realize that blockchain and NFTs are about charging processing fees for every single event that happens the whole thing looks terrible. Eventually you'll be paying fees to track your items stats, so every time you click or tap it costs money.

[tasha0663]

> developer can change things easily, like changing a super rare card in a collectable card game to a common card.

NFT doesn't block this at all. Just because an attribute on the token specifies it's rarity, doesn't mean there aren't a gajillion other tokens pointing to the same thing. Or that someone won't just tweak things on the server so that token_url /foo/92 isn't legendary magic beans anymore but common turd burgers instead.

[spaceisballer]

Is it really a game changer? I don’t see the problem it’s fixing or the benefit from using them. Just because a developer technically could change something means some solution to prevent change should be implemented?

[staticman2]

The developer can change the code of their engine at any time, including interpreting rare nfts to be equivalent to common NFTs, so this doesn't make any sense to me.

[Tyr42]

Or just reprinting a card in future sets, if you want an example from Magic the Gathering.

[nest0r]

That doesn't sound like it would be an incentive for a publisher or developer.