[kemotep]

I’m sure you can understand why game developers are not too keen on allowing third parties to upload arbitrary code into their online games that they can’t easily control?

Allowing people to upload a weapon that does infinite damage or a skin that’s smart contract means any interaction with it steals all other contents of that user’s wallet is probably not a sustainable solution to allowing you to trade things with your friends.

[nomel]

I don't understand your comment, or see how it's applicable. The games that I've seen have the game studio generate the NFTs, and have a collaboration with other games/studios. The asset only exists if it passed through designated wallets. It's simply a receipt for ownership, that you can transfer to another account, so you can trade things in the game, or externally. The games I've seen are simple and use this receipt as a flag to enable some inventory item, just as a regular purchase would, stored in a game studio database, in a regular game. A couple also grab some image files/text.

Maybe you're unfamiliar with game engines, but arbitrary code isn't required to import assets or metadata. But, that's not required, and ins't required in any of the games I've seen. It's just a lookup to an enable flag in the game. You don't mint your own armor and import it.

[kemotep]

Then why use a blockchain at all?

The arbitrary code part is the extensible nature of Solidity smart contracts (in the case of Ethereum). If third party game developers can’t utilize their nfts in your game without an established partnership, then why are we using nfts? You need permission to transfer or upload an NFT doesn’t that defeat the portability argument?

[nomel]

> is the extensible nature of Solidity smart contracts

This is not relevant.

> Then why use a blockchain at all?

No need. Any other public, distributed, transaction records would work. Choose one. Or don't. Some games have implemented this on proprietary systems. If you support the concept locked proprietary systems, then that's ok too! Some people like the idea of things persisting, in some form, beyond the desire for game studio to persist them.

> You need permission to transfer or upload an NFT doesn’t that defeat the portability argument?

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what NFTs actually are here. It's just a number in a wallet, sometimes with a little bit of data. The game studio mints an NFT. It's "part of the game" once it passes through the game studios wallet. The game tracks what has passed through that game studio wallet. The owner of the thing is the last wallet it transferred to. The player of the game adds their wallet address to their game account. This allows the game to know what belongs to the player. There are ways to prove that the player actually own the wallet. The game enables those items if it sees them in the players wallet.

In the context of most of these games, it's, first, a public transaction record used for tracking what belongs to who. It's really really simple. It's public, so anyone can see it. The little bit of data attached can be used to give nicer human/computer meaning to what that number means.

[kemotep]

I truly believe that we are talking past each other.

I understand all of what you are saying and was aware of it before now. I do not see the value add of non-fungible tokens in relation to games beyond a single game. Partnerships, deals, development time, and so on would need to be done to allow for the transaction, transfer, and use of NFTs in between games. Buy a skin from Fortnite from a friend and use it in Halo does not make Microsoft any money unless the smart contract associated with the NFT includes a royalty system to hash out payments between all relevant parties.

It isn’t simple, it isn’t easy, and as you even say, blockchains aren’t even necessary. And if not designed properly can be abused as we have seen with many NFT projects and platforms so far.