For major artworks, people would simply Google the piece and see that it sold for however much money in some headlines previously.

The real issue is proving that a specific sale was the “true” one. There have already been incidents of people trying to sell other people’s artwork as NFTs. If you buy an NFT and the artist later comes out and declares that your NFT wasn’t authorized or licensed or whatever, the value would presumably drop. The artist could then sell the “real” NFT.

Of course, none of this real-world authorization or provenance is actually encoded in the blockchain, nor can it be. The value lies entirely in the off-chain perception of what an NFT represents and whether or not it’s real / authentic / authorized / legitimate.

The blockchain hype has led to a misconception that blockchain solves everything, but they’re all still limited to whatever we all agree the on-chain data represents what we want it to represent.

Ding ding ding. These people have literally no idea what they are doing. You think the average tech VC is a clueless about NFTs? Wait to you talk to people in the art world.

Artificial scarcity is artificial.

Nothing prevents someone from making copies and selling each "unique" one.

Since it is decentralized, there is no centralized authority to take down the copies (that is, a DMCA-style take down).

The "no one can censor you" upsides of decentralization are not without downsides: you cannot censor or take down others, even in cases of copyright breach.

We'll have to create a centralised registry of all tokens on all chains‽

And even though there may be tens of thousands of these search engines/registries built in the next two years, Google (for example, pick your poison) can step in any time and own this if NFTs turn into something more than pet rocks.

Just as there's a central ledger of all the various citizens of the word's countries?

A few trusted ledgers is all that's needed.

It’s the circle of liiiiiiiiiife!

NFTs only make sense within the context of a system (or ecosystem) that has a protocol for recognizing it.

For example, if an NFT represented a game asset, then the game (or potentially a whole ecosystem of games) would be the system that recognizes it, and the NFT would have value within the context of that game.

I really don't understand the use case of NFTs for in game assets. How is using a block chain to trade assets an improvement over the in game marketplaces we already have for games like TF2, DotA2, etc?

The usual answer is that representing those assets as NFTs will somehow make them portable to other games.

This is, of course, a pipe dream. First of all, there's no business reason for any game to implement this feature -- they'd be undercutting their own sales of cosmetic items by honoring sales of items by their competitors. Second, actually porting assets between games is nontrivial; even if two games are built on the same engine, there are significant barriers to transferring assets between them (like differences in physical scale, art style, or game mechanics).

It's a growth/marketing tool for new games to leech specific types of people from other games. You can target a very specific demographic of people (say whales, or hardcore grinders) and reward only those people.

I imagine the first usecase will simply be indie developers wanting to provide a marketplace experience without building their own marketplace.

That is actually first somewhat reasonable implementation I have heard. Still, traditional SaaS in this field might be better option. Not that I think it is big enough market for anyone to enter considering all the involvements in financial side and potential legal implications.

That you can have cross-game assets and universes between different games and developers. Your special Dota skin works as a skin World of warcraft (?) or it might work in ancillary services around the game: could be used as a feature unlock or even log-in for services around the core game.

It can setup a marketplace of unique items without the game founders having to create anything at all, or users recurring to unsafe selling and buying mechanisms.

Game applications are definitely interesting to explore and experiment with.

This idea doesn't work at all. For your dota skin to work in world of warcraft, the developers of WoW would have to acknowledge that 0x1fab... corresponds with $ITEM in $GAME and then spend the time actually implementing that item in the game.

Since that would take an inordinate amount of effort for *absolutely no benefit for WoW or Dota*, this would only ever feasibly be used *between games made by the same company*, which at that point they would just use a centralised database for obvious reasons.

The Movable-Game-Assets thing has been done before on a huge scale by the biggest gaming company in the world, with nintendo's Amiibos. Look at how they turned out! Barely any games on the switch actually support the full set of amiibos, and those that do don't give much. Amiibos already implement the exact thing you're talking about without any blockchain at all.

> This idea doesn't work at all. For your dota skin to work in world of warcraft, the developers of WoW would have to acknowledge that 0x1fab... corresponds with $ITEM in $GAME and then spend the time actually implementing that item in the game.

Yes? Why wouldn't that work?

Since that would take an inordinate amount of effort for absolutely no benefit for WoW or Dota, this would only ever feasibly be used between games made by the same company, which at that point they would just use a centralised database for obvious reasons.

> The Movable-Game-Assets thing has been done before on a huge scale by the biggest gaming company in the world, with nintendo's Amiibos. Look at how they turned out! Barely any games on the switch actually support the full set of amiibos, and those that do don't give much. Amiibos already implement the exact thing you're talking about without any blockchain at all.

Nintendo is a super closed system. But also there is a difference in kind: games that implement API for cross-game assets will get users, players and payers, by implementing an entry way to an already existing community.

The future is uncertain, but if you are not curious about this i don't know what to tell you.

> Yes? Why wouldn't that work?

Because videogames are different? There's absolutely no logic connecting items in one game to another in almost all cases. As such, the set of items the developers would actually want to implement (ever) would be only those that make sense inside their game, and they'd have to reimplement the models and statistics.

Even more so, the effort necessary to implement new items in any game means that they'll only ever bother with the most expensive items (that also happen to make sense within their world), which restricts the set of items *massively*. Oh, and the developers get absolutely nothing back for doing this except a PR disaster.

Furthermore, it's entirely centralised anyway. You have to trust the game client to interpret 0x1fabc3... as $ITEM when the game client could completely lie and change what item that corresponds to, or how useful it was. This is quite literally just an expensive API call.

NFTs serve literally no purpose here. There's no decentralisation, there's no reason why items in videogames should ever be cross-compatible anyway (It's literally like asking why you can't write C# and Haskell in the same file and just have it work).

There are already many cross-game implementations:

1- Taking money

2- Having Achievements and API's on Steam

3- Accepting OAuth login

4- Supporting non-standard inputs like joysticks

And interestingly you could implement 3/4 items above with NFT's alone with some benefits:

1- No store commissions

2- Public data/metrics on usage (that could be interpreted as achievements)

3- No country, age or identity restrictions

The benefit of no store commissions is immediately negated by gas fees.

Public Metrics on usage is already possible without the blockchain, you can do this with a centralised database and an API. If your retort to this is "what if steam change your progress underfoot?", that is nonsense because they gain absolutely nothing from doing that except annoying users.

No country, age or identity restrictions is a disaster. The age one primarily, since it is necessary to require age restrictions on things like online gambling for ethical reasons.

Also, what the hell do NFTs have to do with implementing joystick input?

Gas fees on polygon, L2 and Solana is lower than credit card transaction fees.

Developers of WoW would care to do so if incorporating those items gave them enough marketing buzz and/or financial incentive to make up for the effort of development and then some.

Like let's take something that already exists in games, like Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight is such a popular video game character that other developers incorporated the character as cameos or even playable characters in their games. Here's the Wikipedia:

"Shovel Knight appears as a playable guest character in several games including Indie Pogo, Blade Strangers, Cook, Serve, Delicious: Battle Kitchen, Move or Die, Dino-Run DX, Runner3, Riverbond, Rivals of Aether, Blaster Master Zero, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Road Redemption, Epic Manager, C-Wars, Starr Mazer, Runbow, All-Stars Dungeons and Diamonds, Ghost Police, Mutant Mudds Super Challenge, Pixel Noir, and Mighty Quest.

Shovel Knight characters make cameo appearances in Brawlhalla, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, Two Brothers, Yooka-Laylee, Aegis Defenders, The Reward: Tales of Alethrion, River City Ransom: Underground, Creepy Castle, Puzzle Depot, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Enter the Gungeon, Katana Zero, and For Honor. Its music appears in Just Shapes & Beats and Voez. Shovel Knight collaborated with Arby's in March 2021 to release a set of toys, which included Arby's themed cheat codes for the game."[1]

Now imagine an NFT collection that's popular enough to have multiple games wanting to incorporate it into their games (I'd argue at least Bored Ape Yacht Club is this popular, it's being incorporated into many things already). Yes developers would have to spend time or effort coding it, but the buzz and increased sales from being able to advertise integration with that popular NFT collection could mean some media attention and sales they might not otherwise get.

For Indie Game developers in particular it could literally be the difference between getting any attention to their game from the media at all, or not, and thus between success and failure. Hence why Shovel Knight is in so many indie games (with permission from the original creator).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovel_Knight

Do people on HN not play videogames at all?

Shovel Knight didn't get popular because it was crossed over into so many games, Shovel Knight got incredibly popular for being one of the best platformers of the decade that kept releasing high quality free DLC.

It was notorious for being a kickstarter that actually gave back. The reason it ended up in so many other games is because it was so popular. The exact same thing happened with UNDERTALE.

> Now imagine an NFT collection that's popular enough to have multiple games wanting to incorporate it into their games(...)

This was *already done* with amiibos. They just weren't NFTs, and were infinitely more efficient. Literally any game developed for the switch has an api to interact with amiibos, the names in amiibos are some of gamings largest characters, and barely anybody uses it.

You are seriously detached from what gamers actually want if you think they'd react positively to Bored Apes being put in WoW. Not only would it be a PR nightmare for the developers of WoW, but they would quite literally gain nothing from it except an expensive, comically inefficient lookup table of hashes to items they don't care about.

As it stands, yes. For such a difficult problem it is not suprising NFTs don't provide any mechanisms against this.

Unlike previously, if you do find an older copy on a blockchain you're given stronger guarentees that it actually is older.

If digital artworks move towards proof via hash on blockchains for timestamping I'd imagine this problem would become easier to solve in future!

I think each chain is its own economy when it comes to NFTs.

The NFT you’re buying is like a tuple (cryptocurrency, address, tokenID)

So you already know what blockchain you’re using. It’s like saying “what facebook are you using? The ftp one or the http one or the https one?”