What is NFT Gaming?
If you haven’t heard it yet, welcome to the rabbit hole. Rest assured that if you just heard about NFT’s last week, or you are just seeing how far this rabbit hole of crypto goes, you are on the cutting edge. It’s early, (unless you are reading this in 2024) and opportunity is abundant.
There are a few things to know about the landscape as you navigate NFT’s. The number one thing to remember is to do your own research, balance your risk, and have fun with something you like! As a lifelong gamer, that’s precisely why I created Duo — a Social NFT Card Game — to share the vision of crypto, help newbies get started somewhere, and have fun along the way.
So what is NFT gaming?
Don’t worry if it feels like you are trying to wrap your brain around all these crypto terms or understand how all these pieces fit together. Let’s first look at what an NFT is. A very simple way to think about NFT’s is by looking at what it solves in a digital space. NFT’s give us two very powerful traits that we can use for gaming:
- We can prove a digital item (game piece, action, etc) is unique from all other items.
- We can prove who is the current owner of this item (as well as it’s entire history).
These might seem simple, but if you think about any game you have played prior to the blockchain, there is always someone who can break or change these two traits. Developers can create more copies of an item to increase revenue and players can’t decipher how many or how valuable these items are. Even physical card games, as a more traditional form of gaming, as a player you don’t know if the game pieces you have are the official pieces, copies, or hold any value. With NFT’s any user can audit the entire game marketplace, all past transactions, and hold game makers & developers accountable.
How is this different from other games?
NFT gaming allows us to take these two core traits, and apply them to a whole gaming experience. This means ownership can retain or even increase the value of your pieces because users can use supply and demand with a guarantee that even the core game makers can’t create more copies of those pieces they own.
Game mechanics also change, as with proof of ownership your game item can now carry a history and a story that can increase the value or desire for other players to interact with or value your in-game item. Imagine a historical moment in a championship game where you can tie a game item to that winning play. That game piece still holds the core game mechanics, but the collectible value and story of that game piece becomes the true collectible.
Finally, because users can now truly own their own game items, there becomes a huge opportunity to put them into a global marketplace where you can buy, sell, trade, even create these game items. This means that the time you spend in NFT gaming can actually earn you money to play the game. You will see this as the “Play-to-Earn” model. To think — mom said playing games would never be profitable!
How this will impact your life.
The reality is we have paid large centralized game companies and corporations to entertain us and be the gatekeeper for our gaming experiences. NFT gaming opens the proverbial Pandora’s Box to an ecosystem where playing games, buying and selling items, and creating new in game content can be paid to the specific game community, players, and even guide the direction of how the game should evolve.
This is the decentralization of entertainment and you as a player can now earn to build, play, and grow a game. For example, as we grow our own Duo card game, new deck releases will be “unlocked” by the player through gameplay, then sold into the marketplace by the players, not us as the developers. This expands the number of game items to onboard new players, and you, as the player, should be rewarded with most or nearly all of the value of that new item being sold and the value you created for the new player who purchased it.
Instead of a game developer taking 100% of a new skin’s sale, imagine the only way for that skin to be sold is a current player unlocking that skin through gameplay and selling it to another player and keeping 80–90% of the money from it. This rewards active players, aligns developer/players incentives, and encourages a vibrant marketplace.
The big takeaway is a true value shift for the players. Buying a skin, dlc, or version 13 of a game will die. Gaming will never be the same, the expectation will now shift from the justification of “I played this game 100 hours, so it only cost me $0.60 per hour, that’s a good deal.” to “I’m playing this game and earning $100 per hour as an active gamer, that’s life changing.”
The question you should be thinking about is; what will your kid or even your grandkid’s gaming portfolio / trophy case look like?
