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Comment by Levitz | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that Nintendo kind of does this already with Amiibo. You own a figurine you purchased and by scanning it you verify the ownership, which yields a reward exclusive to owners, the tech behind it is different but the concept is very similar, including the fact that you can resell figurines and that some can get to be very expensive because of supply and demand.

I'd also argue that this feature is lackluster and I don't think it would have had any success at all if it wasn't for the fact that you also get a figurine.

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There are many reasons why amiibo are not like NFTs, but I'm only interested in trashing this "in-game item NFT" idea. When you scan Mario, you have no expectation of instantiating mario into your game, because that would be stupid in just about every context. Smash AI aside.

There is an Epona Link one that instantiates Epona into breath of the wild, but it definitely doesn't do that in Mario Odyssey.

Amiibo are cool. People like them because they're cool and the in game bonuses are a fun little extra. That's very different from the idea of trading in game item NFTs with the intention of carrying over their utility to other games.

Nintendo completely owns Amiibo and doesn't see the value in coding the same effect for each Amiibo into, why would any developer want to put in the work to implement items they didn't create and profit from?

Exactly

You have an expectation that NFTs would surely instantiate objects, I see no reason for that. Moreover I see no motivation for game companies to keep support.

Imagine you have an NFT for, say, a gun, let's go with AK47 because of its popularity, and say it unlocks it for the current Call of Duty (whatever that is now). Why would Activision make it work with the next CoD? Is it supposed to work with Battlefield too? Is there anything stopping people at Valve from giving you a cosmetic if you validate it, if they so desire?

I mean yeah, that's my point. It's a bad idea.

People literally buy devices to emit fake codes to get the rewards despite the fact that they dont actually own the Amiibo....

So maybe this analogy works better than you realized.

The only thing I can think of that NFTs could potentially add to Amiibos would be part of a form of DRM. The amiibo data is trivially piratable onto NFC cards, and there is a cottage industry of custom amiibo cards.

Still though, if you pirate you don't get the actual official figurine, there are certainly other ways to implement DRM, consumers hate DRM, and despite Nintendo's well known aggressiveness in litigating and preventing piracy, they don't seem to care about DRM on amiibos, apparently because the data is not the core value-prop.

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