There's also a lot of technical issues here. What happens if I sell a card while I'm in the middle of playing a game?
And of course the usability issues. What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people (which would quickly become an avenue for fraudulently duplicating cards by having various accounts get "hacked"). And more generally, in order to participate, I need a private key that I keep secure. What happens when I lose that key, because I'm not a crypto nerd but am just an average computer user playing a game? Now I've lost access to everything I spent my hard-earned money on, and once again, Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right (short of giving out free copies of cards, which leads to fraud, etc).
About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
The blockchain is a distributed public ledger, but everything in the actual game itself is controlled by the game developer's centralized servers.
The provenance of any token can be known just by looking in the ledger, and the game's developer could simply blacklist that token on their game's servers, rendering it useless.
The blockchain does next to nothing in this game token scenario. It's still mostly a centralized system.
> About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
Exactly. Although, given that you can't use the tokens when the game servers are down, being unable to trade them when servers are down is probably not a big loss.
One obvious use case is collectible items for games. People spend thousands on games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale. Imagine if the cards you collected in such a game were ERC20 tokens. Instead of all that value being locked up within Blizzard or Supercell's servers, you could freely trade or sell your in-game items. I think that would encourage players to spend even more money on these types of games, and could open up huge new marketplaces for digital goods.