In the long-term, NFTs on their own are not going to be interesting enough to be all that meaningful unless some sort of a game or metagame is built into the process of collecting NFTs. We can no longer ignore digital assets in gaming, and game developers are including the functionality to tokenize in-game digital assets in their products.

Advantages of NFTs in Gaming

In most games, virtual items stay within that ecosystem. There’s nothing else you could really do with them at that point. If a gamer’s account got disabled, stolen, or the user just moved on to another game, the money they spent would be lost. However, with NFTs, players own them. They can sell these assets, level them up, and mash them up to create new ones as well. So, it really gives the players a lot of freedom to build, play, and earn.

What we’re starting to see technologically now is the need to advance the underlying tech so that you can have a business around the purchase, sale, and trading of objects. For example, ‘Mythical Games is using their own blockchain technology within their Mythical economic engine. They believe that creating and selling an NFT game engine will help create more NFT games in the future. 

Gaming also enables community building. It can help you build the right community where the digital assets you own will be valuable and people will want to own them and trade them with each other. This can increase the potential value of digital objects because people consider them valuable.

NFL partners with Mythical Games for NFT-based video game

Successful Applications of NFTs in Games

Merging NFTs with games has already seen some great success. One of the earliest breakout NFTs was “CryptoKitties,” cartoon cats that users can buy, sell, and even breed. The NFT became so popular at one point that it clogged the entire Ethereum network back in 2017. It continues to have an active community today.

One of the drivers of increased digital wallets post the NFT boom in early 2021 has been a game called “Axie Infinity.” These Pokemon-like creatures are all unique NFTs that a user can buy into and level up by playing in a new business model known as play-to-earn. So far, it’s allowed people in developing economies like the Philippines and Vietnam to earn real money through playing.

Warcraft and Minecraft allow users to create their own gaming world or map and provide endless tools to help gamers leverage their creativity and build elaborate, unique worlds. Through NFTs, gamers can also sell their proprietary world or map, and their rights to it, to someone else.

Also, read – Why Venture Capitalists Are Spending Millions in Blockchain Startups?

As more use cases like this crop up, it is only a matter of time before gaming companies begin to adopt NFTs to allow users to freely create and transfer digital goods.