Why everything about video game NFTs is a lie – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader busts some myths about NFTs in video games, including the idea that you can move them from one game to another.

So the NFT hype continues to roll on, with more and more publishers insisting on supporting them despite protests from fans. Joseph Dowland gave a good overview of what NFTs are in a recent feature; I won’t be repeating that here, instead I want to take a look at some of the claims made by publishers and NFT evangelists about how they are supposed to improve gaming.

There are a number of claims about what NFTs are supposed to bring to games that use them, but beyond the inherent wastefulness of blockchains in general the main objections tend to fall into three categories:

Unique items for everyone

This certainly sounds cool: your character, or weapon, or whatever the NFT represents belongs entirely to you and no one else has one quite like it. The obvious problem however is who makes these assets? Building a 3D character model usually takes about 30-50 hours, more for something important, so if you expect developers to make a totally distinctive character for every player then development time will have to be extended by a few millennia.

There are shortcuts of course, Ubisoft’s solution was to make all the items identical except for a meaningless ID number which you can’t even read in gameplay. Alternatively, maybe they could use procedural generation to give you something akin to one of the billions of guns from a Borderlands game, or one of those slightly different ugly ape pictures that every crypto fan has as a Twitter