A Software Engineer's Opinion on Gaming NFTs

I find it pretty funny that people are so opinionated about how games are built when they never cared before. Hypothetical example but I've never heard somebody argue about a company using SQL vs NoSQL datastores for in-game assets before and that's more or less the same sort of argument about them using a distributed ledger.

People keep saying "you could just build your own trading and storage systems for each game" and "databases don't cost money like crypto transactions do" and both of these are misguided. Building a storage and marketplace for assets worth potentially millions of dollars and proving it to be completely secure and bug-free is not trivial in the slightest. Databases do cost money to run and maintain, in software a lot of companies will choose "serverless" solutions where you generally pay per request, this is really not that different from crypto.

Imagine you're playing a game and you don't interact with a wallet at all (it's generated behind the scenes and doesn't require funding) but on the backend it uses NFTs for the in-game assets. It's a large game and the company decide that a tiny fee per transaction e.g. a few cent on some ETH layer 2 solutions, is a worthwhile tradeoff over paying multiple engineers six figure salaries to solve an already solved problem. If nobody plays your game you have a lot less to lose and it's generally the direction most companies would go, it's similar to the cloud vs on-prem decision that is made in development.

I believe some games will take this path and others will be the other case where you do manage and link your own wallet and have custody of the assets and need to fund the gas fees yourself.

What if you were playing a game that used NFTs on the backend and you didn't know, then you continually rant about how NFTs are bad without realising that you actually use them without realising, wouldn't you feel a bit stupid?