Games can load them from ipfs and verify ownership or somehing, but to counterfeit all you have to do is change the shade of pixel by one bit and get a new hash.

So then you have to move to a whitelist system where someone centralized (or a DAO) has to manually act as a copyright system, whitelisting hashes, duplicating the work of the existing copyright and legal system.

My even change 1 bit? Just create a new NFT with the same exact image. Nothing is stopping you.

You can create a smart contract where only a set group of people (ie, the devs) can mint NFTs. You cant just mint arbitrary nfts whenever you want, that's why they are unique.

You can create your own smart contract though.

I'm assuming the idea was games only let the person who owns the NFT (oldest entry of the hash on the chain, or transferred from it, plus however the limited number serial works for "limited edition" vs singular NFTs).

Totally.

Who is going to pay a studio to develop the models, artwork and code required to have a ‘NFT skin’ in a game? Money is made by selling a skin multiple times to return effort.

And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA? The whole concept is a nonsense.

Influencers + shady finance have collided to *create a climate melting scam.

Edit: spelling and errant word

NFTs are a form of Status or Veblen good. This means being useless or grossly overvalued, exploiting craftspersons, being exclusive, prices defying reason are all good properties to have.

A physical world example is the combination of social media marketing, fast fashion and product drops. Items are sold for many multiples of their production cost due to a manufactured air of exclusivity and scarcity. As the items are mass produced from exploited labor, a bottleneck from time consuming highly skilled craftwork cannot be the cause of high prices.

There are many examples of conspicuous over consumption and status goods, all of them defying common sense to most. Remember the "I AM RICH" app? The NFT version is the same principle, merely on a different type of datastore.

Particularly relevant to NFTs is the art world of artificially inflated prices, donations to manufacture prestige and where fakes are hard to tell to the untrained eye and wealthy buyers bring lawsuits or otherwise buy the silence of those who can prove forgeries.

The artifact or artwork is not the goal, instead the ability to take something useless or mundane but somehow demonstrable as unique, prove provenance and flaunt wealth to some peer group considered high status is the goal. I suspect NFTs are currently in a gold rush stage and comparatively more open. When the loose flow of money is over, I expect it will decay back to gated elitism typical of the existing art world.

Underlying something like an Ethereum linked IPFS hash artifact are interesting consensus algorithms for persistent data-structures on open distributed networks. That they're being used in this manner is not surprising. It's reflective of humans, not something inherent to the utility of the tech.

Typically whta is done is that n upper / lower bits of the tokens ID is ignored which allows you to mint 2^n duplicates of a skin.

>And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA?

Too bad. Most games are not going to put in work to support other game's cosmetics.

I think you could argue that Discord/Twitter is the game, which is a much bigger space than Fortnite or CSGO, meaning that the "skins" cost more. Instead of runing around a 3d character, you just type words on a web page/chat client and get points the more people see it.

Except to have some skin in a game, you actually have to have that skin in the game. To put a monkey as your profile picture on Discord or Twitter, you can just do that without owning the monkey. If anything, not owning it is better social proof.

Correct, but to get access to the "exclusive guilds" on Discord you need to verify your NFT for respective guild.

Seems like internet new (maybe last) phase is about "selling everything". sigh

I don't see anything replacing the internet any time soon it is too entrenched currently, it certainly isn't the "metaverse". People will revolt against that. I've already seen facebook overload the past few years along with other social media.

Think of it as breaking out of the games, imagine something like steam profile avatars/pictures etc. tied to your identity that you can use on any page that implements it.

Gravatar has been a thing since 2007.

Yes, and I have been using it since then, this is quite something else tho.

> this is quite something else

In what way, specifically?

From your original comment: "imagine something like steam profile avatars/pictures etc. tied to your identity that you can use on any page that implements it."

That sounds 100% like Gravatar. We already have exactly that, without any of the problematic aspects of being tied to NFTs or blockchain.

I assume you never used steam in the last years? Games drop avatars as items for steam inventory, and you can trade them and put them in special slots, they aren't just random images, its not just avatars its also frames of avatars, slots of stuff to show on profile, animated backgrounds etc.

Except trading of Gravatars, right?

You can build games that verify your NFT and allow you to use the art/resource in game. Well, until Steam deplatforms you I guess.

> You can build games that verify your NFT and allow you to use the art/resource in game.

While true, the only one deciding whether you are granted the ingame usage is still the developer/publisher, so in that scenario you basically just did exactly the same thing as before: a database lookup to check if a player "owns" a particular item. Only this time with a much slower and more inefficient database. Nothing about it being a NFT grants any advantages in that case, the developer can still take it away, ban your account, remove the item from the game etc. because they are still the ones controlling everything. You just decentralized the database entry.

Only this time, the database is global and multiple independent games can all be using a common set of NFT resources that can be unique and transferred from one game to another. COD could release some NFT for a uniform or a gun or something, and an indie developer could incorporate that nft into their game if they wanted.

Sure, but......why? How is that different than just setting 1 instead of 0 on a database for the game somewhere?

Because the nft can be used in any game at any point in the future. It's not just one game with one database. It can be multiple independent games all using the same resources that can be transferred from one game to another.

Like....what? If the games are by the same publisher then that's trivial to do anyway. If they are not from the same publisher....then what kind of "resource" can you transfer? And why would NFT make it any easier?

Idk man, use your imagination. It could literally be anything. NFT just stands for non-fungible-token. It's like a unique ticket sitting on the public blockchain that can be tied to any digital asset sitting on IPFS. Any game or software can verify that you own the NFT without a third centralized party. I don't even play or like video games so this isn't my domain of expertise. Im more interested in seeing NFTs replace ticketing systems and financial systems, where they would represent things like claims to some financial asset.

Well I work in video games, and I can't think of a single thing this could be useful for, that's why I'm asking you for an example.

They can be couterfeited by changing one bit.

no they cant.

What I mean is if an avatar outit hashes to X, change one shade of grey by one LSB and it hashes to Y. You now copied the outgit, and have the earliest hash of your clone on the blockchain. A human has to review if it is the same thing or just had miniscule modifications. Something like neural hashes may eventually solve it somewhat.