How can this be applied to videogames?
Like companies selling "unique" items to people who want to look unique?!
Except it then must be either nowhere near unique, or it creates a logistical nightmare of content creation. Or the game expects to have a total playercount of maybe hundreds. Even that would probably stretch a good-sized team to their limits.
The point is not that the item is impossible to replicate in and of itself, it's just that you can authenticate which is the original one.
You don't need NFT to make a 3D armor model and say "we'll only ever sell ONE of these, whoever buys it will be the only person owning it in the game". You can do it now as much as you will be able to do it with NFT. The difference (on paper) with NFT is that when you distribute a piece of code, you can sort of "authenticate it" through a decentralized registry to that's THE ONE you gave away, and not a copy.
If it makes it easier to visualize, imagine you take a piece of physical art, like a painting or a statue, and analyze it at such a ridiculous level that no matter how perfect a copy of it somebody can make, if you analyze that with the same level of scrutiny it will still be possible to say which is the original and which is the copy. And the registry of all the data for the original is not a single central database, but shared in a sort-of peer-to-peer way, which makes it much harder for a single individual to hack and modify maliciously.
The point is not that I'm creating something that "can't be copied", people will still be able to copy it to a degree that will make no tangible difference to any human, but even if it looks and works identical for all normal intents and purposes there will still be some way to say which one was the original the creator "gave" to somebody, and which one was the copy.
For what we have seen so far in jpgs or stuff like that, it's just another exploitative consequence of FOMO and the need to feel like you "own" something digital through some arbitrary criteria. But there is a much darker side to it looming on the horizon, which is the push from big companies to tackle the infinite free repeatability of digital goods to hold a much stronger control over what people can do with them, in order to make them work more like physical items for which if you sell ten copies of, then only ten copies of it will exist in the world. I have honestly no clue to what extent this can be used for games in practice. I have no idea if this could possibly be used as a form of DRM, but I strongly suspect that's at least one of the things gaming companies hope they'll find a way to implement it as, because they seem to be always looking for the one silver bullet that will instantly nuke piracy forever.
At the end of the day, who the fuck cares who "owns" this one digital object, the only reasons to care about stuff like that are if you want childish bragging rights over it, of if you plan in some way shape of form to prevent those who "don't own it" to use it in the same way as you do. Gaming companies will likely try to leverage both to their advantage.
