GameStop Is Creating a NFT Platform(nft.gamestop.com) |
GameStop Is Creating a NFT Platform(nft.gamestop.com) |
Think of it in terms of an operating arcade. A video game NFT is like a special physical token only you can own (or maybe limited numbers of them) and when you drop it into a game, it gives you a unique item, exchanges for currency in-game, etc. If this is what GameStop is doing, they could be the backbone for all of this - the token machine at the arcade. Or the token machine for every arcade.
I think NFT might become a marketable term for things that aren't an actual crypto currency but use blockchain simply because there is a lot to unpack and understand to explain to someone like a grandma. Some possible uses based on my limited understanding of NFT's/blockchain:
- Revenue sharing of second hand digital games with developers. If a game purchase is an NFT and gets resold, my understanding is there is the possibility for royalties to go back to the original owner. This would make second-hand games a very profitable business for GameStop and game developers.
- Novelty/Collectibles - say a sports star purchases a digital game as an NFT, sells it at auction for charity and now someone gets to own the single copy of that game that sports star owned, with a one of a kind in-game item.
- In-game currencies, cross platform, cross-game. You have a stack of tokens usable across anything. Kinda like old school arcades. Yeah that's not NFT more of a wallet concept, again think of NFT as a marketing concept.
- Verifyable leaderboards, speedrun records, esports trophies.
If I have a decentralized ledger I can authenticate tokens in (at least) linear time with the total number of tokens I have ever distributed. The ledger is also public so competing arcades know intimate details of my business. In some cases they might even know which games are most popular. My customers will also know the relative scarcity of tokens and how much they should be valued, potentially limiting my profits.
Why should I use a decentralized ledger for my arcade?
Most other uses, like whether some particular series of bits have been blessed by a particular person and to the benefit of whom, seem to already have been solved by the nonrepudiation of digital signatures.
It appears to me that the distributed and public properties of the block chain are not being used for good here.
The other important aspect is that these systems and their tokens are programmable: "NFT" is just a standard set of functions within a blockchain smart contract, but new markets are emerging that explore alternative uses of the same tech, such as governance and/or entrance tokens that allows holders to participate in decentralized structures (multi-signature collaborative wallets, DAOs, etc).
Here's two interesting & positive examples off the top of my head:
[1] Hicetnunc.xyz - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
[2] Mirror.xyz - a blogging platform that allows authors to create new markets, e.g. this crowdfunding campaign for a DAO creative residency that rewards backers with governance tokens https://creators.mirror.xyz/20Eyc57rknNJYL9vJa11zvupU_MXP7NZ...
EDIT: I should say I haven't looked at this OP's GameStop link, and there is tons of junk and unnecessary ideas in the NFT/crypto space. But if you look beyond the mainstream media headlines you may find the technology interesting.
In this context ownership merely defines who has the right to be the seller in a transaction. As far as I understand this, blockchains don't handle the issue of duplication, where it doesn't matter who has the rights to begin a transaction - anyone can still access the bits.
For something like currency which is entirely defined by its ability to be used in transactions then the application of blockchain to define ownership is obvious. For something like media, where ownership is not just transactions but also access, it isn't obvious to me at all.
In other words, blockchains and smart contracts handle authenticity of a piece of data when used in transactions. That's valuable for data that is defined by its ability to be transactional. It's not necessarily valuable for data that needs to be more than that.
I would also contend that it's not secure by all definitions.
It looks like they would provide a value similar to that of certain auction houses where large amounts of suspicious money are regularly transferred in the name of subjectively perceived value [1]. Is there something that I am missing, or could this be a tacitly sought-after (if illegal) potential use of NFTs?
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c7883919-26e5-49f5-816b-de1747232...
This isn't a direction I expected from gme but I'm interested to see where it goes
With an NFT platform, the game creator might even issue the NFT such that they get a cut of any resale.
Direct IPFS link is ipfs://QmaLEchFaE7FWhc4MCvYMqoTdK8rV1yfjEC5Bz4jzQRbjS
They've also encoded the launch date as 1626261600.
The owner of the NFT is 0x10B16eEDe03cF73CbF44e4BFFFa3e6BFf36F1Fad. I don't immediately see anything interesting there.
Are you Ready Player One? The future's about to get weirder.
Steam's current strategy of "no second hand sales" (but better sales and distribution instead) really beats anything NFT has to offer and doesn't require forcing a blockchain and mintinv fees into the scenario.
NFT's provide a mechanism (as I understand it) for royalties to creators. If this is implemented for games, then second-hand sales are entirely possible for a digital game. I don't think that's possible today.
I don't know that centralized/decentralized matters much to gamers, I would imagine most users would be signing into a web site with an account that manages all of that behind the scenes.
There's nothing preventing this today, and nothing NFTs solve that would force those features to be supported. It can be done with a centralized ledger (a database hosted by the marketplace implementer, like Steam). I don't see the incentives for the marketplace platform to implement itself in terms of NFTs.
However, I could see game developers and gamers have uses for NFTs using a decentralized ledger to cut out the marketplace vendors from the transactions (or requiring transactions take place only on their systems).
The mental shift that most struggle with, is that the NFT ownership is not owning the digital image/file/media/bits (which can be copied on any machine, “Right click save as”). It’s probably closer to purchasing conceptual art (see Sol LeWitt), or similar to owning a certificate of authenticity handed to you by the artist. Or, perhaps somewhat analogous to “owning” digital property such as a domain name.
I agree this tech does not magically make everything more secure. But, for example, you can query the “current owner” of a million dollar CryptoPunk - as long as the blockchain survives, the database record will be secure & immutable, and cannot be changed except from the token holder’s own wallet address.
Reading the Solidity code & querying the contract myself helped me understand the value here is not in the digital media file; it’s in the ledger record (or state).
https://etherscan.io/address/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab86...
For some assets like currency this is sufficient - currency is only valuable by virtue of the fact it can be transferred.
For art it is not sufficient, since ownership must also cover the ability to be transferred and the ability to view the artwork.
While all of it is a social construct, the semantics of those constructs are very different. My argument here is that blockchains and smart contracts are not sufficient to represent ownership beyond its transfer, which makes it useless as a mechanism to define ownership for assets that need to be more than transferred.
I don’t see it all that different than purchasing and therefore owning a conceptual Sol LeWitt artwork, ie: a few written instructions on a scrap of paper, that (eg: if it is lost) can be simply re-written to restore the work.
Your requirements (ability to transfer and view an artwork) are met by many on-chain projects, eg: see Autoglyphs.