No: most online games don't maintain a marketplace where users can trade their assets for cash, running auctions or whatever similar to eBay. That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues.

Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself.

What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum.

(Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)

> That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues.

I mean, if you put it like that it sounds as if the main advantage of the blockchain technology here is to offload responsibility for the inevitable issues that arise when people start trading for real money, such as scams or people regretting their purchases. But you're not actually solving these problems, you just gain the ability to point to the decentralized blockchain and claim there's nothing you can do about it.

For the marketplace-specific functionality in multiplayer games it could be useful, but I don't see how blockchain makes it any easier to implement or safer. All the stored transactions and data are meaningless if the front-end of the application is not supported anymore, so you can no longer view your items in 3D and use them in-game.

What's the point of owning a Fortnite skin if the game is gone and you can not use or showcase it anymore? Not to mention that even if you somehow manage to retrieve the 3d asset from the information stored in the blockchain, you probably can't legally use it anywhere else due to copyright laws.

i think you missed the part about having to run that service yourself and all the headaches that entails

But you already have to run yourself a similar infrastructure for the game itself, the digital asset tracking is just a small part that can be integrated within the existing systems.