First NFT or Game Industry Product

What is this anyway? Is it some kind of pyramid?

NFT is another fashionable invention of programmers, which, in fact, is a unique entry in a distributed ledger (blockchain). As a rule, it can be sold / transferred to another person. Have you heard about shareholder registers or real estate registers? This is it, just decentralized and on the blockchain. An entry in the real estate registry confirms that you own a specific apartment. An entry in the register of shareholders confirms that you own a certain number of shares in a particular company.

NFT (token) entry confirms. And this is where it all starts: a token may confirm completely different things, or it may not confirm anything – it depends solely on the desire of companies and society to recognize or not recognize them. Here there can be both ephemeral “ownership of the original digital work”, which does not give any rights at all, and full-fledged sets of rights provided for by an agreement with the NFT exchange and the creator of the token.

And no, NFT is not a pyramid and not necessarily a scam – like other technologies, it can be used in different ways. But it cannot be denied that the concentration of scam projects on NFT now exceeds reasonable limits. Treat it like buying a genuine painting, although you can photograph, print, and hang in the closet.

NFTs have exploded due to the picture trading, this is not their only use. It just so happens that this thing works best with pictures. This is essentially the same as owning the original of a work of art.

The key difference is that it is much easier for an ordinary person to participate in transactions with NFT than in buying real paintings, which is why a rather large and active market has formed.

Pictures gave a boost to the popularity of NFT, and businesses began to look for ways to use this technology to make money. Some people suggest the further use of tokens, including in games and the “metaverse”, but here it is important not to repeat a common mistake and not draw direct analogies with the sale of pictures (do not forget to add a joke here about “Save picture as”)

How do they plan to use NFT in games now?

I don’t deny that it’s possible to build a good game entirely on the concept of non-fungible tokens, but in the coming years this is the lot of indie authors. For example, Molyneux can get something like that, although at the moment his concept is no different from Star Citizen, whose authors sell virtual ships and hectares to players without any blockchains (and the olds can remember Entropia Universe with virtual land trading). You can also remember the project “Cryptokitties”, which is hardly related to games: it is based on the mechanism of “crossing” and obtaining new unique kittens, which somehow justifies the use of NFT.

In large projects like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 or games, Ubisoft tokens are still planned to be used simply as a wrapper for traditional technologies for pumping money out of players: selling skins, bonuses for pre-orders, and so on. Try to find out for yourself the difference between “the developers will sell NFT for the appearance of a person in the game” and “the developers will add the appearance of five backers, who have invested a thousand bucks,” into the game.

Or between the promised Ubisoft marketplace and the Steam trading platform.

Yes, strictly speaking, “under the hood” they will work on different technologies (and even then they are just words), but for the players, most likely, there will be no difference. It makes no difference to you whether the information about your purchase is recorded somewhere in a centralized database or in the blockchain – the only important thing is that you get access to certain content in the game for which you paid. Well, it is beneficial for a company to draw attention to its product using buzzwords.

But jokes about copy-and-paste of jeepgs have little to do with reality, because in NFT games they confirm the rights not to some picture, but to certain in-game content.

Probably, on the other hand, NFT guarantees that the developer does not take away my in-game purchase?

Nope. The fact that the NFT technology itself does not allow the selection of tokens does not guarantee that you will retain the rights to your digital assets. Remember that NFT is a certificate. The developer cannot take the certificate itself from you, but nothing prevents him from “unlinking” it from the in-game content. Again, different operating principles “under the hood” with identical results for the players. Compare: “Ubisoft took away a unique rifle from the players” and “Ubisoft stopped giving NFT owners access to a unique rifle for it”.

But if NFT technology doesn’t bring anything new to games, what is it for?

To keep gamers on fire, the media wrote about these games, and boards of directors proudly reported to shareholders on the implementation of disruptive technologies.

The only gameplay application of NFT that comes to my mind so far is the ability to use the same token in different games. Since the registry exists separately, Ubisoft will be able to, say, sell a certificate for the Sam Fisher skin, which will be activated in Rainbow Six, Division and Watch Dogs. However, nothing prevented them from implementing something similar before without using blockchain, huh.

Otherwise, this is the same situation as with the hype on neural networks, big date, agile, etc., the labels of which were molded on everything (which does not negate the presence of projects that were really implemented on new technologies, but have there often been cases when huge gaming corporations experimented and created something qualitatively new?). However, in the comments we can brainstorm about promising ideas!

Okay, is it too early to worry about NFT and Game Industies then?

Or too late. Here’s how to look: perhaps we lost this war even when we accepted in-game purchases in a single player normally. I would suggest dealing with them, with the root of the problem, and not with its decorations in the form of NFT. On the other hand, now you can perfectly chop up karmas at the next blaze in the comments, why not.

You shouldn’t expect any special drawbacks from NFT in the near future either – believe me, marketing departments can ruin your pleasure from the game even without the newfangled blockchains. Well, let’s not talk about the waste of energy for calculating hashes – anyway, no one will believe that the like memes about Greta and “get it, nature!” gamers are suddenly environmentalists.

So write good comments, prepare battle pictures and brace yourself – there will only be more of such news. And may the Ancients help us.