[nkellenicki]

I find it similar to the two currently in-vogue uses of the world "Metaverse" - you've got the crypto/web3 people using it to describe a world where NFT's are usable and recognised across software (ie. Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield), and Facebook/Meta, trying to build a social VR environment not entirely unlike the vision of Ready Player One.

It's entirely probably they'll merge at some point if they haven't already.

[simonw]

This idea, "Armor you buy in Call of Duty is useable in Battlefield", to me illustrates so much that is frothy and unrealistic about this space.

Think about what it would actually take to implement such a thing:

- Call of Duty and Battlefield - rival games from rival companies - would need to agree to an integration at a VERY deep level

- They would have to share the same asset formats, such that an asset designed for one game could be used in another

- Issues of balance would have to be resolved: just sharing 3D models wouldn't be enough, they would need to agree on a system for modelling damage, armour piercing capabilities, visual effects...

- Then they would have to add blockchain integration deep enough that weapons a player obtains in the game are represented in a way that the other games can see.

- ... not to mention figure out some kind of exchange rate / add some kind of additional economy to their games, which would need to be shared across different games such that e.g. a pistol in Battlefield wasn't worth the same as a machine gun in Call of Duty

That's just off the top of my head.

And... they're supposed to be games! Game design is about balance - creating a set of rules that players enjoy.

Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.

Pretty much every idea I see coming out of this space has the same problem: it sounds plausible in a high-level hand-wavy, but collapses the moment you start to dig into the details of how it would work.

(My absolute favourite bad idea is still real estate on the blockchain, where presumably if I forget my password I can no longer sell my house)

[roywiggins]

> That's just off the top of my head.

And all of that hard stuff could be done entirely without blockchain, and would indeed not be made any easier by blockchain, because it's all just tricky gamedev work. Once you've got all that stuff done, you could just use an API or a normal database to transfer "digital assets" between games, and skip the blockchain stuff.

Oh, is making an interoperable API too hard? Well, it's not going to be any easier on the blockchain...

[profmonocle]

> Allowing some cryptocurrency-billionaire to jump into any game they like with the best possible guns and armour doesn't sound any fun at all.

If the game just trusts any NFT in the right format to be an item, you wouldn't even need to be a crypto billionaire. Minting an NFT costs less than $100 worth of Ethereum according to a quick Google search. Lots of random gamers would pay that much to mint a set of armor that grants + a million percent to damage or whatever.

The only workaround I can see to people minting insanely overpowered NFT items is to only trust NFTs minted by a whitelist of trusted game developers, so you have to actually get the item in a trusted game. But, of course, that completely defeats the purpose of using blockchain. It might as well be a normal API with a database. In fact that would be much more efficient because of the very high costs of publishing data to a public blockchain.

[layoric]

Even if you ignore the integration part and just leave it as a marketplace to trade/sell items, as yourself and others have pointed out, don't need a decentralized, public, cryptographically verifiable database (aka crypto/blockchain) for such an implementation.

Steam Community Market[0] pretty much a long running example of such a system, but it is missing one thing, you can't 'cash out' beyond your Steam wallet to spend on other items that aren't games or other virtual items. I think this is a valuable feature as it prevents the massive speculation on virtual goods that would absolutely ruin the ability to collect/use virtual goods for an economically efficient price.

Without it, I 100% believe artificial scarcity would prevail in search for the maximum value extraction.

[0] https://steamcommunity.com/market/

[adnzzzzZ]

I mean, I'm an indiedev and while I think that line of thinking, of re-using items between games, is pretty weak generally, I can see some use cases for it.

This already happens partly with asset stores like Unity's https://assetstore.unity.com/, where you can just buy assets to use in your games and multiple developers end up using the same assets. There's nothing preventing "popular NFT asset packs" from being a thing that, on top of helping devs make their games faster, would also end up helping indiedevs attract people to their games, since they'd be implementing certain NFT packs and users who own those would be more likely to check those games out.

Like I said, I think it's a pretty weak idea but it's not that crazy or ridiculous to imagine it happening to some degree.

[eb0la]

You don't need an integration at all: you just call the other company smart contract to see if the user has a specific type of equipment defined by an NFT.

Problem is that this information should be private.

If I know you are a heavy user of some other game, maybe I can sell you something to advance in the game quickly instead of having to play a lot.

Is it desirable? For a game company, maybe. But for an insurance firm?

I am not so sure.

[pylon]

What problem was "real estate on the blockchain" trying to solve?

[zenlikethat]

I don't really think of that proposed use case the way you are presenting it there -- I think of it more as, there will be a massive public cache of items, available to buy and sell on a neutral marketplace like OpenSea, which only one user can hold at a time, that game developers can bring in-game if they so choose. The implementation details would be unique to each game, and driven by demand of the NFT holders, so maybe some would be better in one game than in another.

And I'm not some NFT zealot by the way. I just think the way you're presenting that use case is quite a strawman. You're saying the companies have to agree to a bunch of stuff, but they don't, and that's the whole potential imo -- each can pick and choose how and if they want to bring a given NFT in-game.

Walking through your points --

- Rival companies have to agree to integration at a deep level -- they both have to independently decide to support a given NFT type, yes, but they don't have to agree with each other about how it's integrated. For instance, one might allow you to don your armor purely for aesthetics, whereas the other might add some performance advantage for owning it.

- They have to share asset formats -- not true -- the original NFT might point to some image, but each game could simply verify token ownership, and have their own assets representing it. Loot, for instance, is just text on a background. There's a lot of room for creativity in interpreting how those text descriptions might be implemented.

- Issues of balance have to be shared -- not true -- because each game could balance and implement the item the way they choose. And again, the base case could be a pure aesthetic implementation.

- They have to add deep blockchain integration -- I don't follow your point there -- they certainly would have to call the chain to verify NFT ownership, but again, they don't have to agree how to represent the items.

- Exchange rate -- isn't that the point of a public market like OpenSea? The market is already there, bidding and offering every day.

- Billionaires paying to win -- who's to say some games wouldn't invert what you'd expect so that common NFTs can actually keep up alongside rares, or even have advantages over them? Maybe in pitting a mob of commons against the rares, for instance. Again, this introduces more possible choice for players -- if some company today breaks their game mechanics to favor pay to win, you don't have a way to move your existing investment in that game anywhere else. Whereas if frustration grows with some popular NFT game, a competitor could come along with better balance and eat their lunch.

[vimy]

You’re overthinking it. Nft is a proof of ownership. So you import your Call of Duty armor in Battlefield and you get an equivalent ingame armor. There doesn’t need to be any agreement. The game just needs to know which nft is equivalent to the ingame item.

It’s kinda like McDonalds doing a promotion. If you bring a Burger King packaging you get a free Big Mac.

[z3t4]

It could be more doable if the games used the same game engine

[TacticalCoder]

> ... currently in-vogue

Around 2014 I looked, out of curiosity, into Ethereum and its EVM before Ethereum came out. Back then I even ran a node on... a Raspberry Pi (!). If I remember correctly even in 2014/2015, the official Ethereum client/node, written in Go, called "geth", was already using the term "web3" everywhere.

I'm not saying it's good or bad that people are using that term but all I'm saying is Ethereum using the term "web3" predates the "Metaverse" announcement by at least seven years IIRC.

It may be "en vogue" now but credit where it's due: Ethereum was using that term a long time ago already.

[babyshake]

Where better to utilize NFTs (digital art, mainly) than virtual and augmented reality?