Comment by jayd16
4 years ago
Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here?
Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading.
If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's possible.
Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing?
I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge.
I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.
You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.
My bad, I assumed we were already talking about on chain games. I agree that on chain loot drops are more difficult to implement than the traditional way. We'll have to see how much gamers in the future care about their items being NFTs or not.
It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games are digital Ponzi schemes.
> wouldn't gamers just hack their own items?
if the game could be such that this is equivalent of proof-of-work, then it would be fine.