A number of NFT promoters have made the argument that other video games could support the WoW NFT and then that content would be portable across those games!!!

Okay, but none do, and none will, and any other video game that did code in a substantially similar functionality would simply sell the same content in their own game, there's no benefit to the company to spend the time and money to make the content and not get compensated for it especially given radically different content architectures, visual styles, levels of detail, physics, object-player interactivity, etc. You can tell this is true, because they could already make it interoperable now and they don't -- like it's entirely possible that Marvel could sell "buy the Spider-Man game and get Spider-Man costumes in every other game he's a crossover character, across all platforms" and they... absolutely don't do this!

But also this vision is predicated on there being a small number of canonical NFT brands, when in reality you can open up Grand Theft Auto Online and there are literally tens of thousands of items made for the game. So if there's 10,000 items made for GTA Online and 50,000 items made for the Sims Series, then interoperability means that Square Enix needs to add 60,000 items to Final Fantasy to support subsidizing the NFT marketplace for the other two games? Or else you sit around trying to import your Mercedes Hood Ornament NFT from Forza into Mortal Kombat 13 and it tells you "hey, we don't support that one! Or that one! Or that one! Or that one!"

And you can tell this is true because Nintendo already has a system for this called Amiibo where you buy little figurines with fungible codes that putatively can work in any game that supports them. And 99% of games on Switch don't support any, the ones that support any only support 1 or 2, and only one game supports more than 10 or so, and it's a crossover fighting game called Smash Bros.

You might say, okay, but Amiibo are finnicky, they take up space, NFTs improve on Amiibo by not having you actually need a physical object. Okay, but the vast majority of the value is in the physical object. You can tell this is true because Nintendo has the capability of reprinting the relatively expensive physical figurines as marginally nearly zero cost trading cards and... they don't, because there's no real demand.

But then you say, no, the key thing to NFTs is their non-fungibility. Okay, but that's a horrid fit for games. Now instead of modelling Mario once, I need to model Mario a hundred thousand times. If the differences are small between each model, then I get the benefits of procedural generation so it's less work, but the market collapses because the token is as-if fungible and that means the supply is as-if unbounded. And as Nintendo, wouldn't I rather sell each Mario costume for $1 to every player that wants it rather than selling one Mario costume for $100 to someone and then establish an elaborate crypto-driven derivative market where I get a chunk of each secondary sale?

It seems like the most obvious way you can make NFTs actually be something different is when you overtly lean into the bizarre gambling, ultra-rare one offs, and big money market speculation stuff, and at that point you no longer have a game at all, which is probably pretty bad if you're a game manufacturer. But game manufacturers have tried this too, with limited edition sales (Nintendo sold a game last year that they discontinued after 6 months to preserve scarcity, both digital and physical; Nintendo has also done ultra-rare and non-fungible collectible Pokemon leveraging real world events), numbered editions (Atlus with Devil Summoner 2 on the PS2 in 2006 or so). Even one-off multi-thousand dollar stuff has been done in the gaming industry, with special issue collectible hardware (Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have all done this).

Like the issues raised in the currently top upvoted thread, almost everything about NFT in video games is pretty easily analogized to something people have already tried and failed at in video games or something people currently do in video games more efficiently without NFT. And it seems the people entering the space, rather than study what works or doesn't, start from the premise that they read a novel that described something they thought was cool and then trying to blue sky that in video games.