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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
tokens are just tokens, it's like having a bunch of pointers to JSON documents in a big flat file. if you want the tokens and their data to be discoverable then you still need to host some kind of UI to let people browse and issue transactions.
All blockchain gives you is the payment and settlement part of the process (a private key can reassign "ownership" of the pointer to your document), and it does so at the expense of any ability to reverse a fraudulent or accidental trade. Got a virus and lost your apes? Wow sucks to be you, if you're no longer the owner please take it out of your profile.
this is such a widespread misrepresentation/falsehood in crypto, that it makes all this other stuff go away, like we suddenly won't have any trading firms or crypto exchanges, therefore no need for buildings or employees or heating or lighting. I've literally had people on HN tell me that crypto was gonna mean no more "wasted power and heat" from financial services companies, like commodities or equity traders are just gonna disappear because we came up with a new mechanism for HFT.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.