1) It enables users to own their assets regardless of the state of a centralized server.
2) Standardized format to trade on any third-party marketplace. A player could sell to an investor who has no intention of playing.
2 mostly makes sense to me--ownership can be managed independently of the game, and without a bespoke integration with that particular game. I do wonder a little how important being able to turn game assets into general-purpose instruments is (meaning, to the success of the game), but I can see how it expands the market and in particular how it makes it harder for the game company to manipulate that market, which makes the assets more reliable.
I'm not sure I understand 1 though. Don't the assets only have value in the context of the game's mechanics, which _are_ centralized? Like if the game decides your bag of holding no longer holds anything, or even to simply ignore its existence, does it matter that you have a token asserting your ownership of the bag? In theory, the token could have value as a token outside the context of the game, like a meme stock or, uh, the current price of Tesla, but that's true of anything tradable.
Regarding 1: Sure the game itself is centralized, for example Axie Infinity might even ban players who "cheat" according to their definition of cheating. So if you are a bad apple or get banned without justification, then block chain won't help you.
If however (some years down the line) the original game creator abandons the game, any group of people could jump in and revive the game (by re-creating or updating it or doing something completely novel) based on the state that is still available on the block chain.
That's a nice property, but it seems like only a marginal benefit to Axie? Something like, players are more likely to invest money and energy into the game if there's some chance their assets' value will outlive Axie, thus slightly reducing the risks to their investment. Seems like that would be a small effect, or am I missing something? I guess what I'm trying to understand here is how crypto is a big game changer.
The bargaining power is much higher on the user site. "I did not like the new feature. Take it back or we throw together some money to build a competitor. We already have all player data, it is on chain."
