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Game collectibles as NFTs. I thought being able to trade/buy/sell a game skin for example sounded like a cool idea since it would allow users to trade freely without the game company having full control of the collectibles. The idea was massively hated and I’m not sure how something like Overwatch 2 is preferable when people that want to get skins need to buy a battle pass to grind or pay for an overpriced skin where 100% of the profits end up with the game company.
I still don't understand how you people expect this to work. Your skins aren't going to do anything unless a developer adds them to their specific game.
What incentive does, for example, Epic have to do all the coding and modeling they would need to do in order for you to use the pickle Rick skin that you bought from a someone else, in Fortnite?
I’m merely saying that if you earn a shiny skin for X game then you would be able to sell it to someone else that wants to use it on that game. The Steam Community Market already does this except it’s not called NFTs there.
It's not called NFTs because it's literally not using NFT technology in Steam. I've never seen anything suggesting using NFTs for video games that couldn't be accomplished with a database and a store page like what Steam does.
It's not about "accomplishing" something that couldn't be done with a database. It's about making these items tradeable on a platform that doesn't belong to a single entity, which is often the original creator of the item you want to sell. As good as the Steam marketplace might be for some people, every single sale pays a tax to Valve, and the terms could change at any moment with no warning. The changes could be devastating for the value of your collectibles that you might have paid thousands of dollars for. This could not happen on any decentralized system. It could be something else that isn't NFTs but it would absolutely have to be decentralized. Anything centralized that "accomplishes the same thing" doesn't really accomplish the same thing.
It's worth noting that this sort of market control would never be considered ok on any other market. Can you imagine a car manufacturer requiring every sale to go through them? Would you accept paying them a cut when you resell your car? Would you accept having to go through them even to transfer ownership of the car to a family member? If a car manufacturer tried to enforce such terms on a sale they would be called out for it and it would most likely be ruled to be unlawful. But nobody questions the implications of the same exact situation in a digital marketplace.
That one part of the NFT idea that actually sounded good would never see the light of day. If blizzard implemented NFT in their games they would store data in the blockchain but would not accept anything from the blockchain that didn't have a matching receipt in their servers.
Those things don't HAVE to be NFTs for it to be done. I've also seen some devs say they're wary of adding such a feature when it was brought up to them due to concerns of potentially encouraging hacking, which could be part why you don't see it very often?
I'm kind of surprised that you feel like NFTs are a better option, but at the risk of giving you the benefit of the doubt, I'll explain my opinion. I hate the thing you're describing, a marketplace of tradeable whatever, because it's completely the opposite reason I play games. I play games to experience mastery and get rewards for skilled achievements. If I can just buy them, they mean nothing. So, at best, NFTs have zero value to me. Secondly, another reason I play games is to get away from the nickel and dime-ing of real life. Games start everyone at the same point and give you challenges. Marketplaces like NFT auctions or whatever just reinstate the real-life scenario where rich people, who usually don't deserve their wealth, get disproportionate power over everyone else.
I agree with you if a game has 0 micro transactions then that’s the one that I want to play but sadly some of the most popular multiplayer games are riddled with them already.
On these games you’re already able to buy a shiny gun or a skin for ~$25 and if that’s not going away I would at least prefer to be able to trade or sell the items.