NFTs in Practice
Introduction
NFTs are still in their infancy stage with a ton of room for innovation. Gaming is one sector where this innovation can truly push NFTs onto a much larger audience. What if popular video and card games used NFTs? How would it look?
Card Games
As we’ve seen with Pokémon, collectible trading card games have become extremely popular. This has led collectors into buying and selling rare cards for absurdly high prices (reminiscent of certain NFTs). The highest price ever recorded for a Pokémon card was $900 thousand in 2021. Many other card games have blown up in popularity as well, and one could easily imagine a future where NFTs replace physical trading cards. Most things are moving online, and that is only increasing with time. NFTs would allow these cards to be verified online, eliminating the possibility of fakes, which has become a huge problem in the industry. These NFT cards could also be used to play games online and easily bought/sold.
RugZombie will be bringing you an NFT trading card game in the near future, so be on the lookout for announcements coming soon!
Sports Cards
Sports cards share many of the same attributes as trading card games, except they aren’t usually used in games and sell for much larger prices. The highest price ever recorded for a sports card was $6.6 million in 2021. Sports has gained a much larger audience as a whole, which has led to a massive community of card collectors. NBA Top Shot has entered this space with their various sports trading card NFTs, which gained a large amount of attention at the start of the initial NFT bull run in 2021. Although that attention has since dwindled, Top Shot has set the stage to come for the future of digital sports trading cards.
Most of the current popular sports games, such as Madden or 2k, now feature buyable cards that can be used in-game Unlike NFTs, these are not tradable for real money and are under complete control of the large corporation that created the game. So far, there haven’t been many developments in this area, but there is clearly a ton of room for opportunity in the future.
Video Game Character Skins
Fornite has become one of the most popular and successful games of all time. In Fornite, players can buy “V-Bucks” (the in-game currency that can be used to buy skins) for their characters. This business model has generated billions of dollars in revenue for their parent company, Epic Games. Many other games, such as CS-GO, have had similar success by selling skins. If these skins were turned into NFTs, the owner would have full ownership of the NFT and even use it across a set of different games. Also, the NFTs would be easily tradable on a secondary market, which could generate the parent company a ton of money through royalty fees. In theory, the NFT model could benefit both the players and the company.
Metaverse Games
“The Metaverse” doesn’t really have an agreed-upon definition, but generally the metaverse refers to a virtual 3D space where users can create an identity and participate in an in-game economy. Projects such as Decentraland and The Sandbox show early examples of what these games could look like with their integration of NFTs as land plots and characters. Currently, these games are far from fully realizing their potential and host relatively small userbases. However, many other companies (most notably, Meta) are shifting their focus towards developing the next “Metaverse” game.
In general, games such as Minecraft, have already seen developers integrate NFTs onto their platforms. Profile picture projects have been and can be easily integrated as playable skins on all types of games. Whether it’s in “the Metaverse” or not, you are likely to see NFTs start popping up all around gaming.
FAQs
What’s the difference between fortnite v bucks and cryptocurrency?
With cryptocurrencies, you have verifiable proof of ownership of that asset, as long as it is in a wallet that you control. With Fornite’s V-Bucks, Epic Games has complete ownership of your coins and can do whatever they want with them at any time.
Why would anyone want a trading card they can’t hold?
This is a big point of contention with NFTs, and one that can be explained by the mimetic theory. In short, the mimetic theory states that as humans, it is part of our tribal nature to want to imitate models who endow objects with value. This is why people pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for luxury watches. Owning a picture of a bored ape is no different. Therefore, the case can be made that despite the lack of tangibility, NFT trading items hold just as much value as tangible objects, so long as people desire to own them.
