Did you just get one? Butterfly knife in Counter Strike 2? You’d probably like to carry that over to Call of Duty: Warzone, but you can’t. Are NFTs the answer? Getting game makers to embrace a decentralized ecosystem of interoperable items may be part of the way forward, but it’s not a silver bullet.
There are divisions over what the future of gaming will look like. One camp believes that interoperability is the next revolution in gaming, with NFTs serving as the vehicle to enable unique item ownership and functionality in games and apps. But many in the other camp believe this is simply not possible.
Interoperability in gaming allows assets to be transferred from one game to another. This furthers the concept of true ownership of digital assets, preventing users from spending thousands of dollars on a game, only to have it wiped out when the next game comes out.
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Crypto advocates point to NFTs as the solution because they can represent a unique item or asset and can be connected to various games and decentralized apps (dapps) with a wallet. But owning a tokenized item that lets you drive around virtual worlds and games doesn’t solve the problems surrounding actually making that whole process work.
“When you think about interoperability, you imagine: I can take a gun from Fortnite and it will work in Call of Duty. Obviously that’s never going to work, right?” Tobias Batton, founder and CEO of Ex Populustold Declutter‘s GG. “The balance would be lost. How damage works in Fortnite works differently in Call of Duty.”
For now, Batton is right. Interoperability has not yet reached mainstream gaming, and it may be a long time before it does. Meanwhile, developers in Web3 are trying to lay the groundwork for this new era of gaming, but we haven’t seen any particularly prominent or effective results yet.
According to Crucible Network founder Ryan Gill, who is working to enable developers to build interoperable games, there are two major obstacles: technology and business.
It starts with standards
To ensure that assets are easily interoperable, technical standards must be introduced and widely adopted by the industry. While NFTs can facilitate the use of user-owned items in games, much more needs to be done than supporting blockchain assets. A universal coding language could help, but this isn’t Gill’s main concern.
“It’s standardization. It’s agreeing on certain file types and how those file types are built into schemas or into the architecture,” Gill told me. Declutter. “Right now, FBX is kind of a standard in the game development world [for avatars]. Most of these avatars revolve around Fortnite and Unreal Engine or something like that, it’s an FBX file type.”
Multiple games using the same file types ensure assets are easier to transfer and fully functional between games and platforms. Some companies create standards but never release them to the public. FBX, on the other hand, is a file type available to the public and developed by Autodesk. But that doesn’t mean FBX is ready to fill that role.
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“There is no standard skeleton,” Gill said of the main issue surrounding the interoperability of FBX assets between games. “It would be very difficult to achieve complete interoperability in the sense that anyone can trade back and forth, through all these different worlds, with this one thing – because there is no standard way in which the body is designed.”
One way to tackle this problem is to try to achieve industry-wide collaboration, working towards standardized open source file types that will enable the future of interoperable gaming.
The Metaverse Standards Forum is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “advancing interoperability for an open and inclusive metaverse.” Launched in June 2022, 37 founding organizations came together to push for metaverse standardization. These founders include Meta, Adobe, and Microsoft, and thousands more have joined since.
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“The Forum organizes its activities around technology domains where its members see the greatest need and opportunity for interoperability.” Neil Trevett, president of the Metaverse Standards Forum, shared Declutter.
The Metaverse Standards Forum has created an open dialogue between the standards development community and the broader industry. They recently launched the pilot of the Metaverse standards registrywhich aims to serve as a public database of the standardization ecosystem.
The organization is divided into nine “active domain groups” and a number of exploratory groups, each focused on different elements of interoperability. One of the most notable groups is the “3D Asset Interoperability Domain Group”. working on improvement interoperability between the U.S. dollar And glTF file types, two common standards for 3D assets, among others.
“There is always a dynamic tension between proprietary technologies, often controlled by larger companies, and open interoperability standards.” Trevett said: “[but] The fact that the Forum has gathered more than 2,500 member organizations is testament to the industry’s intense interest in the ability of interoperability to create commercial opportunities for companies of all sizes.”
Extra tires with tech giants like Nvidia, Nokia and Huawei helping the organization unite the industry. It’s crucial that the titans play ball and agree on standards, but a lot of work is also being done by upstarts building from the ground up.
Builders are building
As with all revolutionary changes, it is not often the established parties that take the lead. For now, it’s smaller games and Web3 startups that are experimenting most publicly in an effort to embrace and expand the premise of interoperability.
Ready Player Me provides an “end-to-end character system” for developers using the glTF standard. This allows users to transfer their avatar to titles that use the startup’s infrastructure. While AAA games don’t have to rely on these types of tools, smaller studios have apparently adopted the idea, with the company claiming that more than 10,000 developers use it.
“It’s very easy for us to have avatars travel through games that use our avatars because they’re all built on the same standards,” says CEO of Ready Player Mesaid Timmu Tõke Declutter.
Crucible Network Emergence SDK also provides developers with the tools they need for interoperability, although it doesn’t directly help with avatar creation. However, the system is aimed at a different standard: VRMa Japanese standard built on top of glTF.
While these and others attempt to provide interoperable standards for developers, the possibility remains that the gaming industry will never have true, widespread interoperability, but instead an isolated version of it. Tõke sees potential for a mix of gaming networks, but says the goal should be to prevent the trend of closed ecosystems from continuing.
“It is important that the network has the right values, because our mission was to break down walls and thus build a better connected virtual world,” Tõke said. “And it would be pretty ridiculous if we just built a wall around that. “
Mainstream adoption on the horizon?
While smaller developers adopting interoperability is a good start, the end goal for many is for AAA games to come on board and bring the concept to the masses. The Web3 ideal of interoperable games and applications will not have a significant impact if most major players stick to their own walled gardens.
“There should be just one or a few large experiences that fully embrace interoperability and have some scale,” Tõke told me. Declutter.
Fortnite, for example, saw it record-breaking success after its introduction battle pass in season 2. This way of making money with a free-to-play game wasn’t new, but Fortnite was the most successful example of it in the mainstream. In fact, it was such a success that the Battle Pass system has since been incorporated into other major games, such as Duty And League of Legends.
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There’s another lesson we can take from Fortnite: money talks. Game publishers can stick with their current closed models as long as they continue to bring in money. Industry giants need to be convinced that opening up will ultimately benefit the bottom line before they are willing to abandon what already works.
“Interoperability must have a clear business value,” Tõke explains. “Our hypothesis is that if you sell items in your game that work in other games, you can sell more items.”
While this is still just a hypothesis, Tõke believes there are early signs that this could be true. However, he admits that more data needs to be widely available before big companies take notice. For this reason, it is possible that we will see top-level interoperability happening across games from the same developer and/or publisher.
“I think the first forays will be games from the same studio. It makes it a lot easier to choose which NFTs will be interoperable,” says Daniel Paez, Unchangeable‘s executive producer of NFT card game Gods Unchained, narrated Declutter.
Paez added that he sees studios tapping into interoperability to combine communities, rather than starting from scratch with each new title.
“Why can’t we just treat it as one community with different subcategories?” he asked. “I think that’s where we’re going to see the first attempts to actually create interoperability: tapping into your entire community, as an organization versus segments of it.”
In this sense, interoperability doesn’t have to be as simple as transferring a skin from one game to another. Instead of, burning(or effectively destroying) an NFT from game A can lead to you getting a reward in game B.
For now, interoperability is still largely an experimental concept driven by the Web3 gaming scene – a niche space that many gamers use. are not fond of exploring. Organizations are working to create industry-wide standards to bring that idea into the mainstream, with or without NFTs in the mix, but significant hurdles remain.
However, prominent game studios are certainly watching with a keen eye – waiting to see if interoperability is a model that gamers like and can monetize, and perhaps also whether NFTs are the best way to enable that functionality at scale. Until then, we’ll all have to be content with just our Fortnite skins are available in one place.
Additional reporting by Andrew Hayward.