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0 pointsdrusepth4y ago0 comments

I'm still dubious behind the economics of even high-value NFTs finding their way into _some_ games.

Assume I own a game studio and someone (say, Louis Vuitton) wants to convince me to add a purse NFT to one of my games.

Unless they pay me to do so, I'm not going to dedicate the several-person workload (between artists, shader techs, QA, and production) necessary to implement that asset into the game for a single user unless they pay me to do so. This seems like a reasonable requirement on my end (and although there may be a company or two that might warrant the "free" work, the vast majority will not).

Therefore, Louis Vuitton now has a "cost" for their otherwise-free value-add NFT -- which can now be multiplied by the number of game studios they need to convince to add their NFT(s) to their game(s). Obviously, this can't scale to "any" game in the current industry (e.g. literally thousands of incompatible engines in use during any year's new releases) and also increases in cost over time as more games come out and/or older games would get updated.

This is also also for Louis Vutton -- I'm even less incentivized to spend more and more manhours implementing NFTs for smaller and smaller brands, and every brand that requests their NFT(s) added to my game(s) is competing in a zero-sum game against eng resources being put towards, well, real work that generates ongoing revenue for the company.

In the current industry, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of manhours required (if not more) to add a single NFT to "any" game, and still a significant amount of that to add a single NFT to "some" games. The primary beneficiary of adding NFTs to a game is Louis Vutton (with a value-add on purse sales) -- not the studio that actually has to do the hard work to implement it. So... why would they?

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MisterBastahrd4y ago

Companies are already paying millions of dollars for advertising in games. You don't think there's value in Supreme selling a sweater and giving people an NFT with any purchase that they can redeem for a set of gear in Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto Online that they can then resell to anyone they want? You can create a smart contract that remits a portion of any sale to any address you want, meaning that all of their participating partners can get a cut of any NFT resale going forward too. And the best part is that unlike in-game merch which is meant to be consumer-grade and affordable, there's no reason to do this with NFTs. There are TONS of people with huge bank accounts who game and just need a reason to spend money.

Gaming is the perfect market for this because there are SO MANY people willing to spend money on non-functional items. How much money has Fortnite alone made for Epic despite the fact that everything they sell in that game is purely aesthetic? I wouldn't be surprised if The Elder Scrolls Online is making as much from their Crown Store purchases for people to decorate their online houses as they do from selling their monthly subscription.

Randoms on the internet became multimillionaires simply for selling and renting out CS:GO skins. It won't take "hundreds of thousands of hours" to add an NFT to a game. You check the blockchain when you load up the game to validate ownership of the asset type (or even just periodically) and you're done. The rest of the time is on art and production. You're talking maybe $10-15K worth of investments that will easily make 2-3 times that for the company when the NFTs change hands the first time.

Eventually there will just be standard libraries created by a third party that gets slapped onto the loading screen just like all the different bits and pieces of the engines running the games people play.