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Genuine question - why do you need an NFT/the blockchain for the "in game" stuff? Why not just manage that "in game"?

And then I guess - outside of "in game" what incentive would companies ever have to work with/create compatibility with any NFT stuff as opposed to just creating something similar themselves and owning it whole? Like if I was Apple, would I make it compatible with Facebook and Google, or just wall in another marketplace?

Blockchain provides a mechanism to trade the token in a standardized way with existing marketplace tools, and without central authority/consent.

Right, but as a game manufacturer, wouldn't I want to be a central authority?

Yes, but only if I think I can capture most of the market. You see this behavior with Apple App store and Facebooks Quest store. Because they own the hardware, they have substantial power to be the central authority and extract the 30% rent.

But for smaller game studios, you may not be able to do it, due to lack of resources, or lack of a moat, or you're not #1 in the space. Then you'd rather go into a collective marketplace. NFTs allow you to have marketplaces with items that are usable in any game that recognizes it.

This has already happened once. For example, in Gods Unchained (a CCG), you can import a Cryptokitty that you own, to decorate your playing board.

https://www.cryptokitties.co/gods-unchained https://blog.godsunchained.com/2019/02/11/cryptokitties-x-go...

It's kinda like cross promotion between games, in the same way mobile games did cross-promotional ads.

You also see this kind of behavior with Openstreetmaps. Google is #1, so they don't care. All the #2 and #3 players are working together on openstreetmaps to collect their market power to beat #1.

What lots of people on HN don't see is that NFTs are public interfaces for interchangable immutable items with a history that any application can choose to honor for interoperabililty. I think you can use it for more than just art.

Gods Unchanied and CryptoKitties decided to mutually acknowledge each other's NFTs so that they can each sell more NFTs, since they are both NFT sellers first and game developers second. There's no incentives for any game publisher to unilaterally accept NFTs created by other game publishers. And this collaboration only works on a 1:1 basis - there's no good way to generically support all NFTs that come from a collective marketplace in a useful way and no incentives to do so without having your own NFTs acknowledged by others.

Yeah. But this way you don't need to build/operate the marketplace.

Operating the marketplace is the point.

But surely you'd still need to build something to work with the NFT marketplace(s)? At which point, why not just own the whole thing?

Well, you can do that already. It's the existing business model.

This is an alternative, for consumers that maybe weren't interested in buying a gun that they can only use in GTA:O, but maybe would be interested in buying a gun from [Game A] knowing that [Game B] and [Game C] (which they already play) allows them to use that same gun in their game. And that nobody else can have that particular gun in those games.

The technology (NFTs) is not really the end-all-be-all, it is lubricant which is intended to make the above use case more likely by enticing buy-in that would otherwise be less appealing.

Sounds like a great way to do all the work and let other people get rich off of it.

> Other people can make their own LeBron statues, but just like having a knock off of a statue in real life, having the real thing is more impressive.

This is the thing though. How do you authenticate the creator of the NFT to ensure that the "legit" token is actually legit.

To give you a concrete example, right now an organisation calling themselves "GlobalArtMuseum" is selling NFT's of artworks held in museums. This is not being done in collaboration with any museum, the artwork is counterfeit.

How do you set the "authentic" NFT in the first place without rigorous compliance controls?

And once you have this authentication, how is it any better than a normal “contract of sale” or such.

Who makes money from the original NFT? Why would the game company not want to capture the revenue with their own NFTs? And why would Decentraland then honor the NFT some other game company issued, instead of issuing their own? Any entity who's providing utility associated with the NFT is going to want to sell their own NFTs - why would they do all the work only to have some third party capture the value?

>With NFTs being so new, people haven’t seen the eventual way they’re supposed to be used across ecosystems and their only experience with them so far is that they are useless.

Why do you suppose it is that the first use case that has gained near-mainstream appeal is a use-case that portrays them as "useless"?

So there's a central registry somewhere that validates "this is lebron's real nft"?