I have been a long time skeptic of game item NFT’s. This is coming from someone that has spent thousands of hours across almost every genre of game.
I’ve heard arguments that sovereign ownership of items is going to revolutionize the industry but if a game client just decides to ignore a given NFT the company has taken away the usefulness of your NFT and all you’re left with is a struct on a blockchain that no one is going to buy. I’m actually skeptical about most items being tradable. I saw what that did to Diablo 3 at launch. It was more profitable to play the auction house than play the game. If meaningful performance gains can be purchased your game is pay to win.
I have heard that there is going to be a metaverse of items that games will import from one another. I can see this for cosmetics but I’m skeptical that the polygon+texture map of the item is going to be on the blockchain or IPFS. First, the download times to load each item when you encounter something new are going to hurt user experience. These things have to be shipped with the game client. Second, even minor differences in scaling between clients renders this approach useless unless a standard scale is adopted. Third, even that only applies if the games have similar styles. Lastly, even if this was possible from a technical perspective if company A sells the item why should company B support it unless they are also getting paid? Just seems unlikely to happen for me outside a single ecosystem. I can see cosmetics spanning blizzard games but those could be managed using a blizzard database.
What I find interesting about this new “play to earn” model that is catching on has nothing to do with sovereign ownership or some abstract metaverse concept. It has everything to do with the SLP and AXS Uniswap markets.
Back in the days of UO I was a gold seller. The concept was simple; I was providing improved entertainment quality to people playing that game for cash. The interaction between the game and the real world economy was just terrible. It was a black market exchange via Ebay, it was explicitly against the ToS, scams ran rampant because transactions were not atomic, and as a buyer even if the transaction was successful there was a good chance the gold was stolen/hacked somehow and you were just funding crime. The income was abysmal but child labor is illegal, so there ya go.
About a decade later came EVE Online. They made an in game item that could be redeemed to pay the subscription fee. Due to this it had a hard monetary value (or the perception of one). The problem was still that the bridge was one way. There was no in game supported way of selling these items back for cash. It was like buying a gift card at Best Buy. It could be redeemed for $10 of value within their ecosystem but if you just wanted cash out you were still using black markets on Ebay etc. It inherited all the same problems as selling gold.
AFAIK, the new generation of blockchain games such as Axie are the first time we see a two way market in these games. Even in the days of UO I was effectively playing to earn. That’s nothing new. An external market however streamlines that experience and makes it a canonical option. This is huge for blockchain adoption because even what was an abysmal wage for me growing up would have actually been a substantial wage for people making $1 a day if the monetary rails existed for them. Blockchains have provided alternative monetary rails that you can use with just a mobile phone. Combined with the games public market, you can now seamlessly play to earn. All any game like EVE has to do to to attract this new class of Axie player is tokenize their already-existing monthly subscription item and add a deposit/withdrawal system hooked up to a blockchain of their choice.
And they will want to. This paradigm is seeing an undeniable uptick in new users, especially in harder to reach areas of the world. Money is the great motivator. This is a cultural backdoor into blockchain for likely millions of people. Once Axie starts making public headlines due to its size and revenue other game companies will pay attention. I could see Steam gift cards being tokenized by Valve and tradable in game for cosmetics, WoW subscriptions by Blizzard when they get desperate about a declining user base, game ownership NFT’s being tokenized and traded in other games within a publisher, game rental NFT’s being tokenized by Gamestop. All that was needed was the monetary rails Ethereum and a DEX provide and a single integration point to the game. We could very well double or triple the number of people with an Ethereum wallet just because of this.