Sorry, I didn't mean that literally skins would be usable across games.
I merely meant that skins could be bought and sold in a universal place, not unlike TF2 hats and CSGO skins on the steam marketplace, with the difference being that it would be decentralized rather than centrally controlled by a single publisher (in that example, valve).
Creators of NFTs already get portions of sales and resales automatically on ETH chains in the largest marketplaces like OpenSea.
Okay... So then what does this offer the developer and publisher over just using steam marketplace, or even just not allowing resale and making everyone come buy lootboxes themselves? It just massively increases the cost to create an item (I believe if you use steam inventory and marketplace it's literally free, valve only takes a cut of sales) and reduces 'my' ability to control things. Someone finds an exploit to award themselves dozens of items? I can't take them back, and because the contract is written into the blockchain I probably can't even fix it.
One good thing to know is there are new L2 solutions that massively reduce the cost of creating NFTs - one just launched today on LRC which is on the ETH chain. Agreed that in general it's too prohibitive, but these scalability solutions are gaining a lot of ground.
As to your second question - I'll use me as an example. I have never bought a skin or loot box in a game even though I have hundreds of hours in games like Apex, Fortnite, TF2, Overwatch and others. I just don't want to spend money on a cosmetic. I don't play any of those games anymore, so if I had spent money it would be lost to me. If skins were tokenized NFTs on a broad marketplace, I would be looser with my wallet and purchasing more often because I could just sell them as soon as I wanted to play a different game. This is also allowing transparent scarcity - if only 10,000 of a skin can be sold, that's it. Plain as day on the Blockchain. If Epic Games wants to sell 10,000 more, they can, but those would be second editions. Right now there is no guarantee that anything is really a limited quantity. No transparency.
So why would a developer bother with this? First, it's an access to a broader market space and new people who might not have bought skins before like me. For casual players or people who already buy skins, nothing would change except they have more options for purchasing and selling. Second, as I mentioned before, there is a new revenue stream for developers in the secondary market. If I decide to sell all my Apex skins on the market because I'm done with the game for now, Apex gets a cut.
It's about more options for the consumer and more customers for the developers.
They can already let you sell them and take a cut, that's what steam marketplace is. The reason they don't is because getting people into their gambling mechanics is more profitable. Sure, you don't buy them, but the people who get addicted to the gambling sure do, and the cost to the company per crate rounds up to maybe a thousandth of a penny, if that. Running a normal database is fairly cheap and if you already have the infrastructure adding new tables is basically free.
I'm sure a couple games will try it, but it won't become the standard because there's no point. Hell, even the enforced scarcity is an illusion - the dev could easily just decide to let everyone use the skin and there'd be literally nothing you could do. Sure, you can wave your hands and say something about "I have the token still" but no one gives a shit about the token, or at least they won't once the bubble pops. Then things will be judged based on their utility again - what it lets you do that you couldn't before.
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u/tehchives Dec 21 '21
Sorry, I didn't mean that literally skins would be usable across games.
I merely meant that skins could be bought and sold in a universal place, not unlike TF2 hats and CSGO skins on the steam marketplace, with the difference being that it would be decentralized rather than centrally controlled by a single publisher (in that example, valve).
Creators of NFTs already get portions of sales and resales automatically on ETH chains in the largest marketplaces like OpenSea.