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Comment by trynewideas | Hacker News Reader

> I had already pointed out that we've long had a way of converting an object in one game into one of equal value in another: money. Sell your bow and arrow for cash or crypto-tokens, then use those to buy what you want in the other game. There's no need to decide how to translate it into a space game world where ranged weapons are far more commonplace; you will always get a replacement of the exact same value in the second world as what your bow and arrow gave you in the first world.

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That's another great point for why NFT game items are never going to be a thing: game companies don't want users to be able to trade items. If they did, it'd already be possible the easy way with cash. But it's not and they try to crack down pretty hard on anyone they catch engaging in outside market making.

Just because that’s true for most games, doesn’t mean it’s true for every game. I could imagine building a game where p2p trading is one of the core mechanics and I’m sure it’s already been done. Not my type of game, but maybe someone’s

Er...trading items between players is a core part of basically all MMOs, many ARPGs, some TCGs, etc. It's a huge thing in many games, including some of the most popular games on the planet.

...none of them use or need NFTs or a blockchain, and in every instance I know of, the existence of such would be actively harmful.

For a blockchain to make sense, you need a number of factors, probably chief among them that there is no single trusted entity that can run the DB. For bitcoin, that makes (some) sense. There is no Bitcoin Inc that could plausibly track the balance of every BTC wallet, after all!

For World of Warcraft gold it makes no sense; Activision Blizzard is already running a centralised database of how much gold every player has, and every player WoW has obviously trusts Activision to run the DB, just like they they trust them to run every other aspect of the game (eg, content creation, balance tweaks, competitive content, etc.). WoW (like any MMO) is an extremely tightly curated experience.

You don’t need a blockchain for a digital TCG, but it feels like you “own” the digital product more when it’s tied to a protocol like ERC-721 instead of some random developers implementation.

Citation needed, I think. :)

Keep in mind:

1) I "own" some cards in MTGO. That is, there's a line in a DB run by Wizards that associates them with my account ID. I can log in and confirm they're in my collection, and I can trade and sell them to other people. It feels a lot like I own them right now, and it's hard to see how that feeling can be notably enhanced.

2) Of course, all that goes away if the MTGO servers shut down, or if my account is banned, etc. My MTGO cards are mine only as long as Hasbro cooperates, which is...exactly the same as if they were using ERC-721 tokens. Nobody else can run an MTGO server, and the hypothetical token showing that my account owns a valuable card is useful only to the extent that Hasbro lets me use it or trade it to others, which they could stop doing at any time. The token has no possible value or use outside the MTGO ecosystem, and if Hasbro has blacklisted the token (or shut the MTGO servers down), no value inside it either.

Blockchains can have significant value, but they are fundamentally a DB technology (certainly in this context). There are very, very few times where it makes sense to argue that a game would be better if the devs had just used a different DB tech. And this doesn't seem to be one of those times.

Someone give me one reason why a game developper would want to give an inch of support to someone moving to a different game than theirs?

Let me rephrase in realpolitik terms: why would Epic let anyone move their stuff out of Fortnite and into Apex Legends?

I think there actually is a nugget of something there. Platform owners want to keep players on the platform and don't particularly care what they're playing.

So Sony wants playstation players to give money to them but don't really care which game they're playing - and if Timmy is tired of Fortnite and is thinking of moving to Apex Legends on PS5 or Escape from Tarkov on PC, they would rather give a little and let Timmy bring a Fortnite shirt into Apex instead of losing him forever.

But then I don't think "web3" has any use here, it's just a business decision "oh you own item X on fortnite and you're a ps5 player? well now you also own item Y in apex if you play it on ps5".

That thing already exists and is completely niche and inconsequential.

> If they did, it'd already be possible the easy way with cash.

There are a lot of marketplaces (trading platforms) for in-game items. This exists. I fully agree that NFTs don’t bring any benefit to the table, and that game companies won’t enable transferable NFTs.

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