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Comment by _manifold | Hacker News Reader

> The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds.

The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.

As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.

However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.

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Exactly. Why is Epic going to design and support a Fortnite version of your hat NFT when they get nothing out of it?

Stupid. Ponzi. Crap.

> Why is Epic going to design and support a Fortnite version of your hat NFT when they get nothing out of it?

They do though. The argument is two-pronged: (a) developers earn secondary fees on open markets, and (b) players get to resell stuff they don't want. It's literally a win-win.

Disclosure: the above poster is the co-founder of an NFT-based gaming project.

Epic can make more money by locking players into their walled garden. Nothing short of government regulation would convince them to spend more money implementing exponentially more items into their game while also taking a smaller cut of each item's purchase and resale.

Know what’s better than 5% of a resale? 100% of every sale!

Tim Sweeney knows.

You forgot what drives every good for consumer thing a company does: competition.

If every games company is allowing users to resell their items, and Epic is not, they just look evil. We're not there yet but when we are you don't want to get the reputation of being the evil company that seeks profits above all else.

Social media companies "look evil" when they don't allow users to freely use third-party apps and clients, but they still don't, because that doesn't make them money.

And competition doesn't/won't solve either problem, because third-party apps aren't why most people choose social media platforms, and reselling hats isn't why most people choose a game.

In other words, the proposed feature is something developers want, not users.

That still leaves you with the chicken-and-egg problem of how you get to the point where "every games company is allowing users to resell their items", when it's not beneficial to any of them to start with.

Epic, or any studio could have done this without web3.

The perverse incentive of the "token" and making a boatful of money suddenly gets people concerned about developer's income.

Roblox already supports this on a centralized platform. You can buy items/cosmetics on the platform, and then use them in any game.

The amusing thing is the people who actually are drafting standards to move objects between virtual worlds have nothing to do with NFTs.[1] That group includes Epic, Unity, NVidia, W3C, Autodesk, Microsoft, Meta... The people who make stuff work.

[1] https://metaverse-standards.org/

"Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible. "

Except in Diablo 3. Where all that killed the game.

> Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.

This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course it wouldn't be a carte blanche, but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.

Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.

What's in it for the game developers? They don't profit from the scam so why would they support it?

They could be paid a fee when transferring your item to a different game universe.

Please don't poison the well by calling it a scam.

edit: -4... Time for some of you to read the HN guidelines I guess.

So an item you bought/found/won now costs you more money to move to a different game. Not only would you have it cost money but there's no guarantee the OrcFucker2000 in Game A has any meaningful ability in Game B. If that's not a scam is certainly is wearing a scam's uniform.

He asked how it could be done. I explained one possible way, there are probably more ways. I don't get why people get upset about this, it's a bit weird.

It could be cheaper than buying a similar item on the new game. I don't see how that is a scam, I just use the definition that's in the dictionary. Who is being deceived and defrauded here?

Why do you assume the item you transfer needs to have an ability? I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.

edit: You could for example display the rank you have in one game in another game, assuming the possibility to do this exists of course.

> I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.

Since it costs thousands of dollars to store any significant amount of data on the major blockchains, any game item will just be some reference stored on the blockchain.

Unless every game developer builds an appropriate model for every possible item there's no "simple" importing of an asset. Even if a full asset was shared between games no two games are guaranteed to display even a texture the same way.

Even your example of "rank" is meaningless. Rank in one game doesn't have anything to do with rank in another game. The number of goblins you killed in a fantasy RPG has no meaning to a racing game.

As for these being scams, there's no reason any of these things require a blockchain. Games have at various points supported custom player models, skins, spray decals, and all sorts of other shit. None of it needed the added rent extraction of a blockchain.

The only reason to add a blockchain is to get players to prop up whatever shitcoin blockchain is being used. They get vague promises of asset reusability but actually just get normal scammy in-app purchases.

You're missing the point here, the point is it's possible. There are many different blockchains, it's pretty evident noone is going to add some in game NFT to a blockchain where it costs several thousands of dollars. The technical details really aren't that important for my argument.

I'm not debating whether it's a good idea or not and I'm not interested in that debate either.

You're doing the same thing as you did before, you twist my words into something that is easier to attack. This is the third time now, please stop. Rank in other games is something people ask about or mention when playing somewhat similar genres so I can definitely see that being interesting to some people.

None of the things you mentioned has anything to do with scams? Rent extraction != scam. in-app purchases != scam. Blockchain != scam.

It's generally considered helpful to point out scams, and NFTs are 100% scam. They really have no redeeming quality. They seem scammy at first, and as you look into details, they fail to be useful at any conceivable level.

To give some examples: (1) they are not legally binding; (2) even when a legal contract exists between the NFT issuer and the first owner, the terms don't carry over in NFT trades, unless additional contract terms are signed outside the blockchain; (3) as such, they don't solve any problem they purport to solve, as buying the NFT itself on chain is irrelevant, only the off-chain contract matters; (4) they don't even contain the item they are about, or at least since hash of it, in the vast majority of cases; (5) they don't even solve the real problem of fungibility, as while the token itself may not be fungible, the item that it represents remains trivially copyable. I am sure there are more.

- All the kids like <random viral NFT> we'll get publicity if we implement it.

- Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game> we will pay homage to this game by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game.

- Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.

There's an order of operations here. These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in. Anything that a random person creates that nobody cares about would never be ported in.

But why does it need to be an NFT? Why not just sell a DLC themselves? As we're all aware, the NFT isn't the art.

I don't think it needs to be an NFT. The integration of "check if thing is in wallet" has a low barrier for entry for the needed operations: creation of the various NFT's, the checking of ownership, and cross platform (windows, playstation, steam, Nintendo) support. The key points are the digital wallet decoupled from the usecase and "tokens" that anyone can create which go in the wallet.

I would guess that if "Web3" becomes the thing crypto people aim for, GCP, Azure, and/or AWS will implement "public ledgers" that have a very similar interface and may or may not rely on blockchain underneath. Any decentralized blockchain would be forced to compete with those centralized offerings.

I think of NFTs as a DB entry on a shared database.

The benefit is someone else can make a marketplace, analytics or other tools that work for many items across many games without you having to spend time implementing them yourself or creating and maintaining an API for this data.

But why would I want them taking stuff out of my game? I can see the appeal of putting stuff in the game, but then again, if I wanted to put stuff in the game I could just put it in the game, the NFT doesn't' mean anything to me.

It's about the composability with external tools and users being able to trade assets without you having to explicitly code for it. Games companies want this for the same reason they want modders - because their game is enhanced by it and adds more value for its players.

You say that like it's technically easy to transfer assets between games that might use differentl engines. It's not like a database entry.

Also it's bad for players, as the visual identity of the game would be destroyed by items coming from other games. Yikes.

Building the actual game object in game is the hard bit - they already solved the "get an item from an external source" problem with keycodes.

> These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in.

Meanwhile, in the real world, whenever some company wants to implement NFTs they get massive backlash from their player base.

Yeah the whole gaming usecases are DoA until if/when that changes. I wonder if this backlash is really different then all the related gaming ones that proceeded it. Early Access, kickstarters, Pre-orders, day 1 DLC, micro transactions. I'm sure I'm missing some and all of these were hated by the gaming community at various times with various implementations and nuances. Meanwhile they generally seem accepted now that people know the red flags and how to judge an implementation.

I would think “tolerated” is a better description than “accepted”. And it’s often not the case depending on how egregious it is (e.g. Battlefront 2).

Almost all of those things are in some way user hostile, too (E.g. preorders, micro-transactions).

> Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game>

This is not something you want to admit to if it’s true, because you haven’t got the rights to old game you’re copying.

> - Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.

Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.

"by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game." The part you left out was meant to imply that the "Genre defining game" developer created the NFT's for the purpose of other people integrat them in the game and them getting free publicity,. Therefor rights would have been included.

> Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.

For the same reasons that people buy games instead of pirating them most likely. "Right click and save" is a fundamental part of the internet yet digital things are still are bought and sold. (edit including DRM type mechanisms if this pattern became a thing that actually mattered money wise).

> Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.

Exactly. If I were a game studio given a choice between letting my users bring in objects from anywhere or forcing them to buy my objects, I would pick the latter.

> but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.

It would not. Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs. Every piece would need to be created, modeled, textured, and animated.

I suppose it would be trivial if you created a pile of uninteresting and uninspiring games with the exact same engine, assets, and art style, like so many NFT's of depressed-looking monkeys

I mean, file formats like VRM are a thing, which allows sharing avatars across many games.

> Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs.

There are plenty of games that support user-created assets. There's like zillions of skins in CS:GO that don't need to be "manually created, textured, and animated" by Valve (by design). Your argument just betrays a complete non-understanding of modern game engines and how cosmetic items work/are created.

Gamedev here. Each engine and each game will have vastly different asset pipelines, you can't just copy something across and it just works. Models, textures, shaders, animations, etc usually go through several stages of internal tools before making it into the game. Of course, games with user generated content will make tools available to create things for that particular game, but you can take that and use it somewhere else.

And that's just the technical side, design and art would be horrified if you have no control on what can be added to a game.

Ok, so it's just textures, not new game objects, models, or animations? That's even more like the sad NFT monkey images than before!

You can't put those CS:GO skins into Skyrim. It would probably be easier, like I said, to move it to another source engine game with the same art style and the exact same models, but that's it.

There are a lot of examples where it's trivial to do this now. For example, Diablo III and Immortal are owned by the same company and run through the same portal - can I transfer gems, skins, or titles between the games? If I'm a Master's SCII player could that show up in Overwatch somehow? Maybe I could play as a Zealot!

If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now? Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.

> Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.

Amusingly, Valve has already experimented with this (and, as far as I can tell, given up on it). There were a handful of in-game items in Team Fortress 2 which were given to players as a reward for purchasing certain games, or for completing specific achievements in those games.

This made TF2 unplayable for me - I have a rare item (iPod earbuds) from the initial Mac launch, and the next few times I signed in I couldn’t get away from people spamming me to trade them.

This is one reason you wouldn’t be a crypto billionaire no matter how prices went up; you’d probably sell first.

This was an argument why email will never work too. Spam filtering will get better over time.

Maybe for email. TF2's spam filtering got worse -- the game is now overrun with malicious bots, and is unplayable on public servers.

That’s actually why email is centralized now. Gmail’s good spam filtering works because it can see what’s going to every account.

Some email providers (Hey in the US) don’t accept emails from other senders without prior authorization from the user. IIRC Chinese providers won’t accept any of yours unless you have a contract with them.

> This was an argument why email will never work too

No, it wasn't. Email was popular and established before spam became a big concern.

Though spam, and the necessary control mechanisms, is one reason email had become less central.

Yea and then when spam came out there were hundreds of articles that Email is becoming useless because of it.

We encounter new problems, then we build solutions, that's how progress works.

But NFTs and their ilk still don't actually solve any of the problems we have today.

So please stop moving the goalposts.

> If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now?

Do you even play games? It's literally happening between Blizzard games lol. Hearthstone and WoW had all kinds of cross-game cosmetics (mounts, card backs, etc.). Let alone all the goodies you get from Blizzcon in-game (which have a sizable secondary grey market on eBay).

But they only do it for special occasions, otherwise the respective stores would be full of hundreds of them, which they aren't. And if they are doing it right now, NFT's don't provide any added bonus here.

Unless I'm missing something, those aren't cross-game cosmetics. They're cosmetics for a single game themed off of a different game.

A hearthstone card skin has no use in WoW.

It's like the MCEU (Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe) you need to build up the stories and assets so they tie into each other.

>can I transfer gems, skins, or titles between the games?

You could do that since the GameBoy Color and without having to trash the economy, become a fugitive and give Matt Levine writing material for years.

Pokemon Home solved this traditionally. I can transfer pokemon between Pokemon Go and switch Pokemon games (e.g. Pokemon Legends: Arceus)

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