mindcandy's comment sums it up well, but I'll just add that the loot is worthless without the game now - that's the point of vendor lockin.
But if items and their properties are stored in a public-by-default way, then other games can incorporate those items in it (without Blizzard's permission). So if you get some loot in one game, it can become available in others.
The neat idea is that application data from different sources become composable by default.
Frankly, I'm not much of a gamer - but an open ledger is the only basis that I can see to avoid vendor lock-in for the increasingly nuanced virtual environments that we are building.
>But if items and their properties are stored in a public-by-default way, then other games can incorporate those items in it (without Blizzard's permission). So if you get some loot in one game, it can become available in others.
This only makes sense for like gambling games / other financial stuff that values those items as a substitute for money. What game designer would let some other company add items to your game without your oversight? Why would you bother devoting developing time into mao king sure everything renders correctly and has the correct properties in game. What if the other game gets hacked and now people start bringing OP items into your game. If you are designing a game you typically want to have control over the whole experience.
Allowing some/any assets from other games to be available in a specific game would be a design decision. Just another game mechanic that game developers could incorporate.
> This only makes sense for like gambling games / other financial stuff that values those items as a substitute for money.
Here's another scenario outside of gaming - suppose I once bought some content on Apple Music, but now use some other platform. If music streaming services stored ownership information on a public ledger, then those permissions (and possibly playlists) could just be imported into arbitrary platforms. What's better, startups that build a better experience than Apple Music could access that data without Apple's permission.
The core idea is that the end-user owns their data by default (ie, no explicit export); not the 3rd party platform.
It's reasonable to doubt that Apple would want to allow this, of course - they do seem to like their walled gardens. But it does give another concrete example.
I'm going to reiterate my main point - a public ledger that no particular party can control is the only mechanism that I see for avoiding vender lock-in as we (for better or worse) lean ever more heavily into online and virtual systems.
One goal of that would be to take over users of a game.
If the whale in one game can reuse their properties they can switch over and buy some extra stuff from you.
All of this assumes that other games will "play by the rules", in the sense that they won't let you use an item that you don't own. If I can see the resource (and in all current models, the content of the signed media/document an NFT authorizes is public) then I can use myself if my client is so configured. Most games give value to loot by forced scarcity, NFTs don't implicitly enable this at all.
I think that's right locally - you can of course make your local software ignore the ownership of nfts. But if the crypto/ledger doesn't line up, then other better behaved clients can (and arguably have an incentive to) just ignore what your client says. That could mean (in a gaming context) that the rest of the network just ignores your progress in the game (ie, new loot acquisitions).
It's the same thing with Bitcoin node software - any node could broadcast a transaction that contains more BTC than the address actually has. But the crypto/ledger won't add up, so the network just wouldn't accept it.
In fact, flooding the networks with forgeries would devalue the network (and the operator's investment in the project).
Games built on a public ledger benefit from playing by the rules - doing otherwise would devalue their investment in building on the ledger.
But if items and their properties are stored in a public-by-default way, then other games can incorporate those items in it (without Blizzard's permission). So if you get some loot in one game, it can become available in others.
The neat idea is that application data from different sources become composable by default.
Frankly, I'm not much of a gamer - but an open ledger is the only basis that I can see to avoid vendor lock-in for the increasingly nuanced virtual environments that we are building.