Are NFTs the future of gaming?

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have been on everyone’s lips lately. They are used to hold auctions for digital art, with sums running into millions. In principle, however, NFTs have not only been around for a short time, because they were used in various games years ago. Due to the increased interest in the mainstream, more and more game developers are recognizing the potential of NFTs. Could you use this to determine the future of the gaming industry?

The origin of NFTs

The term NFT is understood to mean a digital object that cannot be replaced. While normal tokens of a crypto currency are available in multiple versions – like a 1 euro coin – NFTs can only exist once. They are therefore comparable to works of art and are often used precisely for this. However, NFTs are not fundamentally intended as digital art, but have their origin elsewhere. The first project that moved in the direction of the NFTs was called Colored Coins and tried to assign unique attributes to the tokens of a blockchain. With CryptoPunks, however, the first official NFT project based on Ethereum did not go online until 2017. 10,000 different avatars were created for this, which can be bought by buyers with ETH and nowhave achieved incredible prices . The most expensive sale of a CryptoPunk happened on March 11, 2021 and was worth the equivalent of 7.58 million US dollars. At the same time, the game CryptoKitties was launched, in which users can buy and breed cats with unique characteristics. If particularly unique characteristics arise in a breed, this can even make the virtual breeder rich. This paved the market for the first NFT collecting games.

Different types of play with NFTs

Since then, however, other ways have been found to accommodate NFTs in games. That proves z. B. the game Axie Infinity, in which players collect little monsters, train them and let them compete against each other. The trained monsters can also be exchanged or sold. The gameplay is thus reminiscent of the legendary Pokémon franchise and has a similar gameplay. However, players can even earn money by collecting SLP tokens while playing, which can be exchanged for ETH. The game Gods Unchained, on the other hand, is reminiscent of trading card games such as Magic The Gathering or Hearthstone. Players can use it to build their deck and play their strongest cards against dangerous opponents. With Illuvium, an RPG with NFTs will even appear in 2022. Players can earn in-game rewards and exchange them for ETHs. This means that more and more games should also offer an income opportunity, which can be higher or lower depending on the course.https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzT88eN4gts?feature=oembed

Future technologies for gaming

NFTs will definitely play a role in the future of gaming. More and more developers are adopting blockchain technology to offer their players interesting collectibles or even to offer them a pay-to-earn structure. Certainly the number of games that use NFTs will increase in the long run. Even so, there are plenty of other gaming trends that will dominate the market for years to come. AR and VR technologies in particular have been considered the future of video games for quite some timeand are therefore increasingly at the fore in developing better gaming experiences. Although there are already many games that are dedicated to the new realities, we are still a long way from exploiting the full potential of the technologies. Popular AR games like Pokémon Go rely on the small screen of smartphones to combine reality with animated graphics. In the future, various smart glasses will help to achieve the integration even more realistically. Such glasses already exist, but are neither affordable for the average gamer nor particularly advanced at this point in time. VR technologies, on the other hand, develop faster. Many HD games can already be played on consoles and PCsbe found – but we can look forward to many more! In addition to the new realities, the trend also seems to be developing more and more towards online and multi-player gaming. Single player campaigns that can also be played offline may soon be a thing of the past.

NFTs have now caught the interest of many art collectors, gamers, and investors. They already have a foot in the door in the gaming world, so we can certainly expect many more games in which NFTs and cryptocurrencies will play a role. However, the future of video games is broad and NFTs will only make up one niche of several.