Players can win big with NFTs, they just don’t know it yet
Gaming is not just a multi-billion dollar industry. It is a $100 billion body of water that is projected to grow to over $240 billion with 2026. Skins, tokenized characters, cosmetics, in-game items, power-ups, currency, on-chain lore, and even entire game backbones are being built in Web3, pushing us closer to a new non-fungible token landscape where video game assets take over NFT- the markets.
Last week, CryptoSlam welcomed a new blockchain to our NFT Collection Ranking and Blockchain Ranking by adding Myth Chain and their gaming assets from DMarket and NFL Rivals.
Just a few days after listing at CryptoSlam, DMarket, with its gaming skins, has already found itself in the #1 spot in the NFT Collections rankings over 24 hours, propelling the Mythos chain to 2nd place behind Ethereum in the blockchain ranking.
From Counterattack skins for the player’s assets in the new hit mobile game NFL Rivals, mainstream gaming now has serious representation in NFTs, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Microtransactions for in-game items are expected to reach over 76 billion dollars on sale this year alone, and currently gaming asset NFTs only make up a small percentage of that.
NFTs have turned off gamers and even a large portion of the gaming media. It’s easy to understand their skepticism about an industry ripe with fraud and profiteering, but it’s time they increased their understanding of NFT technology and why it’s such a big change.
I’ll give you some examples of what excites me about game resources like NFTs.
Nothing beats trading in-game items like rare weapons in Borderlands, legendary armor in Diablo, or some of your rarest finds in your favorite MMO. On the flip side, there’s nothing worse than having the trading feature removed due to concerns about cheated items. If an NFT supports every item (remember they are non-fungible) that is validated every time you connect to your NFT wallet, this concern is removed from existence – forever.
What if I wanted to trade the same rare gun from Borderlands for your car in GTA VI? NFTs enable decentralized marketplaces at the click of a button. This is just a small tease of the future of gaming which is not just a dream now; it is actively being built.
I didn’t want to mention the financial side of gaming NFTs, but given the hundreds of billions of dollars that game studios and publishers make, why wouldn’t one be excited for the players themselves to get in on the action?
Since the announcement of CS:GO skins migrating to Counter-Strike 2, the gaming world has seen some of the greatest secondary skins sale in history, with a single weapon skin recently selling for over $400,000 USD. The idea of a game tool that now “lives” longer means that game assets can have a value that would never be possible if they had a shelf life.
I just completed the second biggest trade in CS history! Sold these two on behalf of @Luksusbums
– #1 AK-47 661 ST MW with 4x Titan (Holo)
– Karambit #387 P1 in good conditionTotal sales were +$500,000 pic.twitter.com/EbLyF2NaHq
— zipeL🇩🇰 (@zipelCS) 16 April 2023
NFTs not only extend the life of gaming assets. They preserve the asset if stored properly, along with the record of who owns them forever. Yes, even if a game and its servers are decommissioned, that resource can live on on decentralized platforms. If the appeal of profiting from your game assets turns you off, just keep your asset as a prized trophy that you can look at with nostalgia and maybe share with your kids one day.
Video games revealed NFT’s potential to me when I first entered the technology over two years ago. True digital ownership (not just having an asset that is owned by a company), scarcity and preservation of assets are all baked into a single token that lives on a public ledger called the blockchain. It’s not that NFTs fix existing gaming problems, it’s that they buffer almost every aspect of gaming. This is game developed, like going from Pong to God of War: Ragnarok. From Final Fantasy I to Elden Ring. Now connect NFT technology with creator tools like Minecraft and Fortnite Creative 2.0 and we will see the next chapter of social gaming that games like The sandbox game, Decentralized countryand Yuga Labs’ Otherside is on track to deliver.
We are yet to see a large representation of gaming NFTs on CryptoSlam’s all-time top NFT collection rankings, but let’s not forget that the best-selling NFT project of all time isn’t Bored Ape Yacht Club or even CryptoPunks. It’s the titan of blockchain gaming, Axie Infinity, which has had over $4.2 billion in secondary sales to date.
As a gamer for over 30 years, I understand the spirit of gamers who want to keep things clean, but the fact is that times have changed and so has the video game landscape. NFTs are coming into play, so those are the players I’m rooting for, and those are the players who stand to say “GG, NFTs”.
The Discard 500 NFT Index is down nearly 7% over the past seven days, with NFTs continuing to be hit by high gas taxes. As meme coins trade in high volume, the transaction of NFTs has become prohibitive and many traders are waiting for either NFT prices or gas prices to drop further before buying back in.
