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In-game items are the main drivers of revenue in free-to-play game economies, and yet we’re still a long ways away from unlocking their true potential. Dated game design techniques have kept our items trapped in 1-sided game economies, hidden behind in-app purchase-locked loot boxes.
What if we release them from these shackles, and make our in-game items usable across ALL our games?
This is a new frontier enabled by cross-game items. It will create a wealth of opportunities — not just for players and developers — but also for a vast spectrum of value creators that are yet to be discovered.
Gale Force Gif from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDf6pFx4DNwThe Promise of Cross-Game Items
When you finally acquire a Gale Force in Fortnite (after paying 950 V-Bucks and completing several hours worth of quests), you don’t actually own that brand new harvesting tool. You only unlocked permission to use that item: a permission that’s account-bound to your Epic login.
Your ownership of that Gale Force is an illusion, all dependent on your access to Epic’s servers.
What’s more, the item is trapped in that ecosystem. It’s designed to only have utility inside Fortnite, and has no other possible value outside the game. (for more details, see Ownership, Utility, Representation).
We’ve been so used to this — game economies have historically been closed to just one game — that we take it as a given.
Imagine this alternative scenario. We earn an in-game weapon in Fortnite, like an epic tactical shotgun. Instead of it just being a skin though, the item is built to be a cross-game item. Upon earning the shotgun, it’s stored not on the Epic servers but is tracked in our crypto wallet, removing it’s dependency from an Epic user account.
Once we’re done failing to get yet another Victory Royale, we can just fire up good ol’ Team Fortress 2. We can then use our crypto wallet to sign into our Steam account, and continue using that same gun to defend capture points as a TF2 Engineer.
A glimpse of our cross-game item future — The Fortnite Tactical Shotgun used in Team Fortress 2 (
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