Once gamers see how much they've dumped into things that will never produce anything of value, they're a bit ticked. Gamers who know other gamers who have done it I suspect are also ticked if they don't feel the short term peer pressure.

At some point the distribution will lean, but I think we're a ways away from that.

I question how desirable that even is. So like some rich kid buys a golden suit and can wear it in a bunch of games...I mean, sure, ok? Not really groundbreaking stuff. Would you buy a game because it lets you do that? Assuming the total cost is the same, I'd just as soon buy different skins in each of my games...assuming I care about skins at all.

And that's setting aside the really significant implementation challenges.

As a player I think I would find it less than desirable to be playing Darkest Dungeon and view Halo content next to cartoon Fallguys. The NFT owner probably wants more than their NFT transformed into bytes and used as a random seed to determine the grain on their wooden shield. They almost certainly want a direct map to their resource.

The developer still needs to implement how this skin or texture is applied in their specific game, so there's still net additional work per skin or texture. You don't just get it for free as soon as someone else implements it in one game.

I'd be curious if even that would be so simple. There could be competing blockchains or types of NFTs. You might also get into the situation where instead of every company building the software to verify ownership they just pay specialized companies.In that situation Web3 technology isn't really all that different than a company building a virtual shop API. A company like Valve could probably do this better than Opensea could and without all the extra Web3 technology.

I agree, and would go even further - is this even desirable to the creators of the game? Sounds a lot like shooting themselves into the foot. They profit off having closed ecosystems and kids having to buy skins instead of already owning them from somewhere else

(This is of course assuming some theoretical process where the NFT has a bunch of data attached that makes it Just Work, instead of it requiring Capcom to sink a bunch of development time into making assets for characters that can only be unlocked by having paid money to another company entirely.)

Nevermind the technical and practical concerns. What does it even mean to apply a Fortnite skin to a battleship or a racecar?

I am with you, but I am a bit more cynical after watching my 6-10 year old nephews get into gaming. All they care about are the skins, it's insane to me but they really like it. Knowing that makes me dislike this angle more because I feel like their entire market vertical will be 6-10 years olds with their parents money. Not to mention the whole, creating addicts out of kids in the name of digital consumerism.

There's this idea of the "metaverse" which I think is informed entirely from fiction and hype. It's very detached from the actual incentives at play.

Is this even viable? Can a skin from say an Unreal engine game be copied over to and used in a Unity engine game?

With difficulty, yes. If you have the asset in the creator tools, rather than just inside the game as a game user, it's straightforward. There's some standardization in this area, and it's getting better. There are now open formats. Look up "GLTF" and "USD" formats. Until about two years ago, most content was interchanged in proprietary formats, but we're now past that. The Khronos Group, which standardized Vulkan, is behind this standardization effort.

Currently, you can usually move rigid objects from one platform to another, but articulated skeletons and scripted objects need manual rework to port.

"Ripping" models from games is a thing. There are tools.

NFTs do not enable asset portability. They are part of a DRM system. The goal of the DRM is to prevent more asset portability than someone wants. This only works if the receiving system pays attention to the DRM. There's no technical obstacle right now to finding the JPEG for a Bored Ape Yacht Club and printing it as a poster for your wall. But you won't be able to mint it as a new NFT and sell it on OpenSea, because OpenSea checks.

We had fbx for decades, only difference is that it wasn't open source. Even better USD is an art format, nearly every concept it supports is for art direction, comparison of various designs, hiding of details that may get in the way of some modellers work. It isn't dynamic, it doesn't even have the concept of level of detail, so it will render a 10 million poly model even if all you see is a three pixel wide spot on the screen.

The technical problem is probably the smaller issue. The larger issue is that the publishers of the respective games have to allow this type of cross-usage, and they do not have an incentive to make their games interoperable with other games.

Even in business software, where there are practical incentives to interop, compatibility at the level of asset sharing remains very rare.

Items are inherently centralized and cannot be decentralized because games can choose to stop supporting them.

Yes. So what? That's already possible without crypto. The game developer decides which player owns what items, and they can charge for item transfers if they want to.

> Players happily pay the price.

This has nothing to do with what I said, and I didn't dispute it. Digital assets are valuable (and have been for decades), and players certainly are happy to pay for them.

> It's the perfect counterexample to your claim that players rage against taxing digital assets on each transaction.

Counterexample != data. Most players don't want crypto in their games. A few players who tolerate it don't mean anything.

But really, I've conflated two points I was making, which is my bad.

Point 1: Crypto adds nothing to digital assets in gaming. They are inherently centralized and can't be decentralized.

Point 2: Games like Axie Infinity, where the gameplay is terrible and serves only as a thin veneer over a speculative market, are not something gamers want. They only serve the creators.

> When you can't see something so blatantly obvious

If it's obvious, why can't you make an argument beyond, "People buy digital assets"?

What value does crypto add?

What are some games that people would not play if they weren't crypto-enabled?

As a player, what benefit does crypto provide me? How does it make the game better or more fun?

What's the difference? I'm not asking about the technology, I'm asking about the user experience.

that’s exactly the point. this adds nothing new or interesting for any party involved (except the scammer and their marketing people)

Sure, but web3 gives you access to a giant ecosystem that you can just plug right in to. You can safely create trades including items from multiple games. To say that this ecosystem adds 0 value to me is a stretch.

It seems like I would focus on creating items myself and selling them to players, since I can't profit from them otherwise.

Unless there is an after sales market I (and anybody else) am incentiviced to reduce the inflow of external NFTs as much as possible.

If I'm developing a game that has value by itself (aka is fun) it's very unlikely that players would put enough pressure on me to care (they could do that now without crypto but so far it didn't happen. Would be much easier and cheaper to implement).

If players are in it for the financial gain, I'm not really developing a game after all.

I never suggested you had to. Other websites could upstart support handling items from different games so you can focus your development resources on building the game and not on building a trading ecosystem.

>It seems like I would focus on creating items myself and selling them to players

You would be the only one able to mint new items. You can sell new items to players.

>If players are in it for the financial gain, I'm not really developing a game after all.

Wanting to have something that emulates physical ownership closer is not really being in it for financial gain. It's much better for players if they can sell all of their skins to some other player when they are done with the game instead of having a ton of expensive items locked up into their account.