Ask HN: Why do people think that our in-game item exchange is for NFTs?

[wtphilip]

We are targetting a small market that is ripe with fraud and scams and want to clean it up: The in-game items trading market.

We have talked to various types of real gamers (dads in WoW, heavy gamers in Eve Online, CS2, Rust and more) and developed a regulated exchange (offering escrow, KYC, trade monitoring, etc.) to provide a safe environment for people to buy, sell and trade their skins P2P for real money. We have loyal fans and users.

However, in many interactions with game developers and developers in general, we are attacked and people scream NFT scam, which is the opposite of what we do.

What are we doing wrong in our communication in your view?

This is our homepage: https://fipme.io/

[throwawayffffas]

The assets of the game you have chosen to feature in the hero image of your homepage look like NFTs. Partially because trading cards look like NFTs. But mostly because that game also has an ERC-20 token that in their words allows the creation of NFTs.

If you featured items from WOW, Eve Online or CS2 you would probably get less people screaming at you.

On a more philosophical level though in-game items are really NFTs before crypto-currencies. So whatever you do you will probably still have people screaming at you about NFT scams.

[wtphilip]

Thank you so much for your comment. This is super helpful and a great point. I am taking this to the rest of the team to see how we can solve this without running into copyright issues.

Funny that you say that I will have "less people screaming at you" as it seems to be a very delicate topic for gamers.

Regarding the philosophical level: It would be, if it was adopted in larger games. I haven't seen any large publisher adopt NFT, yet. This might change though. Hard to say.

Highly appreciate your feedback.

[dtagames]

I worked as a developer on the market for exactly such a system. It was created by a large slot machine manufacturing company in one of their mobile game studios. Later, it was acquired by a company which has since pivoted to blockchain compliance.

Why is this relevant? Because the compliance aspect of this is a total nightmare and you're sure to run into numerous issues in the USA, at the very least. You can take money for almost anything and that's easy to setup. But when you pay out money to people, you've created a financial transaction with endless amounts of legal requirements and red tape.

You'll also have the studios against you for two reasons. Some won't want any outside trading of their digital assets and may even consider it a TOS violation. Others won't want to pay you a cut to run such a service because the profits are miniscule and there's not enough to go around.

Trading game assets is a business about taking a commission on every sale. You'd have to convince studios that there was a business to be had there, when there really isn't. The only exception to this is gambling where you might pay out more than someone paid in. Gambling and NFTs attract whales that allow platform providers to extract high commissions, but regular players and trades won't sustain such a system. The fact that these setups always devolve into gambling is why you're getting associated with NFTs.

[wtphilip]

Thanks for sharing. Cool to know that you worked on exactly such a system. It seems like the story and offering is difficult, due to the history and experiences people have made with such systems. And just saying that somebody is different does not help.

Many things you have written are challenges that we are aware and have been working on. Compliance is crucial here. And on so many different levels as you have mentioned.

We have a license as financial intermediary in Switzerland, which means that we do KYC and we have processes in place to ensure that we comply with anti-money laundering regulation. This was a long way, but it was crucial to offer a real escrow experience, so that it is real P2P and trading experience and not just a fancy store front. And we cannot offer certain items, as this would fall under gambling laws and we do not have any license for this (yet).

Regarding studios: Yes, the value does not lie in the trading for publishers. Trading per se does not add value to publishers. This is relevant for the different types of gamers. We have talked to a few publishers and found out that they are more interested in the trading data, so they can better price their content as well as define new content (i.e. items) that could be created. This way, they can monetize with content that people are ready to pay for.

Thanks for sharing all these hurdles. We'll have to solve all of them. From what we are hearing, we are close to it, though.