Let's take that apart, shall we?
- Unhackable: When was the last time a major digital trade server or store was "hacked" directly, resulting in items being stolen or moved? It probably happened at some point, but never in recent memory. That's because whenever theft of digital items happens, it's almost always by social engineering and scamming, targeting the item owner themselves as the weakest link in security. The "unhackable" blockchain is useless in this case - all it means is that when something is taken from you, or rather you are tricked into giving something away, nobody has the power to give it back.
It happens constantly: games being pirated, games hacked to get in-game currency or items, games hacked to cheat in multiplayer, social engineering to scam people telling telling them you're selling them unoficially FIFA FUT, skins or any other stuff for games, etc.
With NFT the blockchain secures that your user has X game item (let's say a skin or a weapon), period. You can fake having this item. Sames goes with 2nd hand stuff: now with NFT it would be official in a controlled and secure environment where you can verify that the user who says it's selling to you that Counter Strike skin, FIFA FUT card or whatever they really own it and that the transaction is made on a secure channel so they don't scam you.
- Public history: Curious, but how useful? The only reason it's not implemented (or rather, usually visible) for conventional digital markets is that there's no conceivable purpose to it. Standard servers keep transaction records too, they just don't show it unless they have to. Privacy and everything.
Useful first to verify that the user selling it has it. And to bring extra value for very rare cases involving celebrities: the Air Jordan shoes you buy on a store have a price, but the specific ones he was wearing on some NBA finals, even if look the same and smell worse than the ones you can get in the store, will have way more value for a few specific people.
So applied to gaming simps of gamer girls who lick microphones on Twich while wearing a bikini would value more certain in-game item she did use (skin, weapon, customized character, etc). And well, you can also apply it for the average gaming streamer/youtuber/random gaming celebrity (like the sword Mark Cerny was using while platinumed Bloodborne).
Or in terms of eSports, the item a certain popular player did own, on any random moment, or even more when won certain important world finals.
- Mandating rules for transaction: Not any different from traditional markets. Worse, really, considering it's all based on one volatile currency you have to buy into, instead of relying on the dollar or your country's own currency. If it ever becomes a sore point, Steam can just enable the same thing on their Community Market, giving a specified percentage to the game's developer per every trade. It's not like they wouldn't be the beneficiary for most of the trades anyway.
No, it isn't worse.
Your Steam, PSN, eShop, XBL account is volatile, so once they shut down the servers or if you get banned you'll lose every game or dlc you bought there. Same goes with any non-nft game (and all their DLC) that depends on servers, it's also volatile since it will stop working once they shut down the servers. This instead is backed by the blockchain, meaning that doesn't depend on Steam, but in the blockchain instead, that will continue exising as long as people keep using it for this or for other stuff hosted there.
In a traditional market you can't sell me digital items, as would be in-game items or digital games. And well, everything in Steam means that Valve gets a % revenue share cut, and devs don't want to give Valve (or other platform holder) a 30%. In the same way, on Steam you as dev and as customer have to deal with Valve's implementation of nft/whatever system they would use for 2nd hand transaction. The good thing of NFTs is that devs get rid of Valve and similar and do the things in the way they want.
So, pray tell, how useful is the NFT thing, if you're buying an item for a specific game, anyway?
It allows secure 2nd hand transactions making sure the player doesn't get scammed and that the dev gets a revenue share of the transaction.
Wouldn't you be better off just buying the item from within the game? Like, you could actually see the item in-game immediately, verified by the game's own servers and the content database of the developers.
Obviously nothing stops the dev from allowing the player to buy it from the game in addition to being able to unlock it in-game. That would be the same than with traditional games.
The important and different thing here is having a secure -and profitable for the dev- digital items 2nd hand market (player to player transactions). Someone makes a super cool castle in Minecraft and sells it to another user who for some reason deserves it's worth that money. Or a player wants to get rid of certain inventory items no longer is using. Or another one wants to buy the specific weapon an eSports player was using on a certain match. Not one with the same look and stats: the specific one he was using.
With an NFT, how will you verify that you're seeing the right thing? Anyone can make an NFT, containing any code, pointing to any image.
You can't verify that whatever preview you're being given, is actually an ingame item, rather than a picture of an ingame item - you can only do that when you're already in the game. And if the developers have to actually manage that preview, and provide an external database, and all the means necessary to verify an external trade, then - the devs do still have to worry about it, no? They would be far better off using the tools of a major platform to verify trades, to have legal fallback to handle scams, and to do literally any kind of enforcement for them. And if they don't want to do that, they don't deserve the trust of their users.
NFTs are stored in a database where it's listed that certain user that has digital item. Any kind of digital item: doesn't have to be an image. It can be a song, a video, a game, and in-game item, whatever. That database protected by the blockchain can't be hacked. Only the game create the type of nfts it uses, so a random player can't make a similar looking one. You see there that it comes from the game.
The game checks out the database and sees your user is the legit owner of a blue shotgun, so allows you to play using it.
In addition to check out the name, a preview image or the list of current and previous owner, the gamedev also can show there metadata, meaning some extra text that may be useful, images, pictures, whatever. As it could be the stats of the weapons, its level, how many zombies or skeletons have been killed with that sword, if it's a normal/fire/ice/thunder sword, etc. Whatever the dev considers.
There are websites that are NFT stores/auction houses, where users buy, bid or trade there their NFTs. They are handle the transactions/legal stuff/etc. and in exchange they get a % of each transaction.
NFTs in gaming exist only for the enrichment of those who backed NFTs in gaming first, at the expense of everyone else.
Yes, it made people rich. So this is why companies will use it in gaming. Same as in any other industry. Companies introduce stuff that gives them profit.
