It’s a completely made up problem for which crypto is supposedly the solution
- We’ve known for 2 decades how to do skin or items exchange between games. It involves relational databases. Valve does it for their games or at least could do it at will. There’s not one unsolved technical problem here
- There is zero incentive for developers, publishers and licensors (you know the people that make up the game industry) to adopt any of it. My company dies, the licenses terminate and your items are toast. Technology does not at all change any of it because it’s not a technology problem. It’s a licensing problem. And if I paid for the license, by god no other developer else should get that value for free.
- Developers don’t want other developers to affect their own games, affecting visual design, polygon budgets, performance, power or any other aspect of the game. No benefit, only drawbacks.
- No, we don’t want you to bring your lightsaber or mickey mouse costume (you know assets that people actually find valuable) int our game because that’s a straight visit from the lawyers at the house of mouse and probably makes our carefully crafted game look like ass.
- No middleman is only a problem if you need a middleman or the middleman fails to deliver value. Not if you can be the middleman. People attempt to muddle this down to a payments processor issue, but the last decade has shown crypto is just plain shit at that, from gas fees to security, lack of customer protection and any other dimension. And if it’s not payment, well, we could just as well use a database to share games between developers at the same publisher or valve.
- People bring up demand for external markets like Diablo’s Auction house. But these demand economies are fractions of the overall game value systems and increasing the focus on the fraction very quickly erodes and destroys the main game.
- IP licensors don’t benefit if people carry their IP from game to game unless game and game pay the fee
- Publishers don’t want to give telemetry or data associated with the movement of players to others. Sorry, that’s just not a good idea. And they want to sell you items again, not you hoarding older items.
Even gamers … don’t want it. They understand that this is mostly crypto bro driven attempts of turning every game into a gacha / real world money affects escapism fantasy for people with less money when every rich brat is parading their instagram assets through town.
The only people who think this is a great idea (including Boz) are in silicon valley with a long history of failing to understand games.