So the only thing that nft solves is game designers not having to build their market. That does not solve anything for the player. If anything, it exposes the player to a complete loss of his asset, due to mistake or theft. No value in that at all.
I bought a bunch of skins in League of Legends. I no longer play the game. As a former player, I would love if I could sell those skins on the open market.
Many times while playing the game, I changed my main character, but had skins for other characters I no longer played (maybe they got nerfed or something). It would be great if I could exchange those skins for other skins of equal value for the character I switched to.
Yes, the company itself could implement all these different features, but at that point you're re-inventing the wheel. We have a set of standards regarding digital assets, and the technology already exists to do the things I mentioned seamlessly. The only thing the company needs to do is implement their assets as part of that (ERC721) standard.
We don't need NFTs for that, though. We could have an old fashioned Web 2.0 site for a digital skin marketplace. We could have SDKs for game devs that allow them to integrate with it.
The NFT spec doesn't even guarantee the basics of what it needs to support.
How hard can it be to keep a many-to-many mapping between account ids and skin ids, and then make a way to transfer those between accounts, potentially for some fee? Steam has had it for a decade without any issues.
The game publisher still has the final authority on whether a skin is displayed in game or not, and no blockchain is going to change that.
The reason Riot doesn't do this is that it would reduce profits. If they would make more money otherwise, they would be doing that already.
