Going against the usual knee jerk "crypto bad" reaction, I don't think nft-s are inherently bad in games. All the usual hatepoints (microtransactions, pay to win, developer still controls the use of the nfts, etc) are true or can be true with or without items being nfts.
The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.
All NFT based items have the same problem where these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games and they're the ones that end up deciding whether the item has any practical value or if it's even in the game in the first place. If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game when I can make my own NFTs or just go with the classic model where the items are just entries in one of my databases.
There's also a conflict of interest in where someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell out their stock of NFTs at a high price.
The "card game with NFTs" has already been tried, it's called "Gods Unchained" and didn't really catch on because if you type "Gods Unchained" in YouTube search bar the top results are not about the game itself but about the fact that you can earn money in-game. People actually interested in playing the game end up playing with bots because the game has a profit incentive.
> these items rely on the goodwill of the people who make the games
But they rely on the goodwill of the game devs regardless of the items being NFT-s. Patches causing meta changes is a regular thing without NFT-s.
> someone who is both a dev and has a lot of certain NFTs could attempt to make the in-game item busted or required for competitive meta in order to sell
Or just do the same and sell the card in the in-game store for lots of $? As lots of mobile games do.
> If I were a game dev I'd have no incentive to implement some foreign NFTs in the game
By implementing some foreign NFTs you can bootstrap an existing userbase (especially one with clear on chain evidence for engaging with a similar game).
Another incentive can be satisfying the presumed demand for interoperable assets, such as avatars (being able to play with the same avatar in different games).
This all sounds cool in theory but I'd like to point out that NFTs have existed for quite a while now and so far none of these things have ever been implemented in any of the released games. Which makes me doubtful that people are interested in these kinds of solutions in the first place.
I'm not aware of any set of games that let you transfer items among them using a blockchain either, but this doesn't matter. Here's how it could work.
First of all, before being able to transfer items there's some preparatory work that needs to be done, regardless of whether you're going to use a blockchain or not. You need the various game designers to agree on a common format to encode those items, so that the different games will be able to parse the data when trying to import a new item. Ideally, you would like everyone to agree on a single format, but even having just a few groups of developers to agree on one fixed format wouldn't be easy. After that, you have to solve two game design issues: which items makes sense to transfer from a particular game to a particular other game and how to map the different attributes between the two games in a meaningful way.
As an example of the first problem, imagine what would happen if you were allowed to tranfer automatic rifles from Call of Duty to a RPG game where you are supposed to fight using a sword and a shield: you would ruin the latter game. As an example of the second issue, I never plaied World of Warcraft, but I think that WoW swords have very different attributes from Minecraft swords, even if on a superficial level we're talking about the same item, i.e. a sword.
Note that this preparatory work is the hardest part to do, because it isn't a mere technical problem but involves many other aspects. And you need this regardless of the actual technology that you're going to use to transfer the items.
After we solved the above problems we get to the transfer part. Sure, you could use a blockchain, but do you really need it? Here's an alternative way:
when the user decides to transfer an item from game A to game B, game A's server sends a message to game B's server saying: "User X wants to transfer item Y, here's a description of item Y in the format we agreed upon. Do you accept the transfer?". Assuming that we solved the initial problems, implementing such a protocol is easy enough that most BSc students could do it as part of a software engineering course. A possible question could be how the two games would know that they are talking about the same user. There are different possible solutions to this, an easy one could be to use OAuth to authenticate the user.
In the end, the proposal of using blockchains to transfer game items is little more than using a blockchain as a database.
> I'm not aware of any set of games that let you transfer items among them using a blockchain
Illuvium already released a suite of separate games with interoperable assets verifiable on a public blockchain; granted, they are all made by the same parent studio. But it demonstrates the principle.
> Ideally, you would like everyone to agree on a single format
The in-game representation could afford some creative licence by each studio. Having said that, there are efforts to define common standards for 3D assets specifically (even sprite animations for avatars); hard to say how realistic it is.
> if you were allowed to tranfer automatic rifles from Call of Duty to a RPG game where you are supposed to fight using a sword
Nobody expects that all types of assets would be universally transferable between every game imaginable. Simply verifying on the blockchain some proxy for experience points between Call of Duty and Apex Legends, in order to skip some of the initial grind, would be desirable and meaningful.
> you could use a blockchain, but do you really need it?
Blockchains have additional upsides: data persistence, decoupled from the longevity of any individual studio; resistance to censorship (a game could ban an asset, but it wouldn’t be deleted from other games); immediate compatibility with a broader financial system (e.g automatic lending protocols that enable you to get a currency loan against your NFT, without requiring permission from the game).
Your original question was about the existence of other technologies apart form blockchains allowing for transfer of game assets, and I answered that. My two main points are that there are other ways of doing it, and that the core issue is more about opening a canworm of game design problems rather than finding a technical solution to the exchange of information between games.
I still think that the added benefits of using a blockchain in this particular scenario are very little and not relevant in practice (e.g. a game studio doesn't close overnight, so users would have time to transfer their items somewhere else and I think no bank would accept my Minecraft diamond sword as a collateral for a loan), but these are my personal opinions and as such are debatable.
There are always potential other ways of doing something, but blockchains are readily available now. It’s like looking at a python library and commenting “i could implement some of that functionality in C, you don’t need to use python”. At some point it becomes a matter of reinventing the wheel.
> I think no bank would accept my Minecraft diamond sword as a collateral for a loan
Nftfi and BendDao are two protocols that can be used to obtain cryptocurrency loans on NFTs.
Blizzard could make their own second hand hearthstone marketplace if they wanted to. NFTs don't create that possibility. Blizzard judged that it's more profitable for them to be the sole sellers of cards at their price. While NFTs would enable secondary markets in hearthstone cards to exist outside of Blizzard's ecosystem Blizzard doesn't want you out of their ecosystem.
Furthermore even if they introduced something like that I highly doubt they'd use "some public blockchain" the risks from that would outweigh the benefits - they'd just make their own infrastructure internally.
I don't see a way in which NFTs solve a problem that can't already be solved more simply. After all valve secondary markets for games like TF2 have existed for more than a decade without needing NFTs.
You are kind of arguing my point. Blizzard won't do it because it loves exploiting their status against the player. But that's a point for nft-s, it would make it harder to exploit players. Yeah I agree it won't ever happen, but if it did, that would be a win.
Not “perfectly” well. There is the downside of cost. Without nfts they would have to invest in bespoke infrastructure for creating, storing, validating and trading the assets. With nfts, this entire infrastructure already exists.
I never said NFT-s were required or the only possible solution, I said that I don't think NFT-s in games are inherently bad or evil (which is a quite popular opinion)
Stuff like this would be interesting but I think could only work if all art assets are then also uploaded to IPFS, game code is made open source so anyone could run/build/modify the game experience without any permission of the original publisher.
No game business seem to be really committing to that full picture yet…
True from a pure solo experience perspective, blockhains are a social construct so only relevant between people. I can imagine e.g. wanting to matchmake against only those players in a tcg who will play with the cards they have on-chain.
> For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.
The experiment is going on right now. You can play MTGO or MTG Arena.
You don't think it's enough to remind you that, given the choice between the two options you describe, people overwhelmingly preferred the one that you said was "worse"?
If I don't bother telling you why I think that is, will it be less true? What if I'm wrong about the reason -- will that stop the phenomenon from happening?
> The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items.
I think you simply do not understand the usual NFT hatepoints, then, which is the vision of NFTs you are espousing is simply undeliverable.
Either you have a truly decentralized network that is necessarily expensive to run to prevent spamming, and you add all of your in-game items and transactions to that. This action slows the network down to a crawl, and makes each item swap cost hundreds of dollars in gas fees. Given how even AAA games are costing $60-70 these days, I hope you understand why that's underdesirable.
"What about layer 2???" you may ask. Well, if you would like to go a more centralized route by having a separate blockchain handle all of your in-game transactions, I can point to Axie Infinity [1] to tell you why that's a bad idea. Basically, in the dark forest of blockchain, centralization breeds failure, and unless you're happy with losing more than half a billion (!) dollars worth of "assets" from time to time, that is also quite unappetizing.
Tl;dr: if you're espousing NFTs for gaming after all of these, you either don't understand blockchain/NFTs, don't understand gaming, or have money to make by pump-and-dumping crypto tokens.
Axie Infinity used a proof-of-authority side chain secured by a multisig bridge. It was not what most people refer to as L2s - which can achieve the same scalability as a side chain but with much stronger security properties (using validity or fraud proofs), and without compromising on decentralization.
There’s certainly a good case to be made for NFTs and blockchains in games, but you first have to overcome their associated stigma and misconceptions.
The only difference between an in-game economy where items are transferable and an NFT version is that you can withdraw the items to neutral third-party exchanges and you can see the total inventory of items in the game at all times.
I think there are benefits to having an open economy. With the switch to proof-of-stake blockchains the environmental argument is moot. I don’t see what the big deal is with NFT hate other than a general push back against developers overly-monetizing (but then again, who will pay for servers?) and general hate for crypto.
Imagine justifying a second hand card market for DIGITAL GOODS.
I'm sorry, I'm completely tired by this bullshit. If a multiplayer (and competitive) videogame does not have everything unlocked then it's just a scam and time sink.
The difference I care about is tradability and transferability, which is inherent to nft-s but not to normal in-game items. For example hearthstone, blizzard's warcraft tcg, would be much better for nft cards. It would get a second hand card market similar to MTG automatically if it used nft cards on some public blockchain.