Long before esports had been widely recognized as a legitimate career, popular NFT games including Diablo II “(2000) or Renaissance” (2001) created fully fledged digital economies where the best players can merely earn a living by playing the game. One of your co authors, Moritz Baier Lentz, managed to fund his graduate and undergraduate school by carrying out in – game tasks and offering the associated prizes for real cash, at one time, better than any of the 13 million players in the game.
The early 2000s were, however, a Wild West of digital assets, online identity and virtual ownership, and new nft games marketplaces plus transactions were not entirely legitimate or protected, making stories such as this more of a case study in deft individual entrepreneurialism than a practical professional pursuit. Click here to know where GameFi came from?
The gaming industry has expanded massively, based on central value systems. Today, there are about 3 billion people who play video games, and a whole system has built around professional players, providing enormous opportunities and huge financial rewards. The best are classified as athletes, who are paid as team members, share in the prize money of tournaments and demand expensive sponsorships. Others make money from their live broadcasts through Gaming on audience sites like YouTube gaming or Twitch.
Games have grown to a USD 336 billion company, which includes a wide range of software, intellectual property and hardware, as reported by BITKRAFT Ventures. Gaming has evolved as the biggest media category in the world, overtaking linear television, on-demand entertainment, music and cinema, it has acquired particular features. Moreover, the majority of economic activity related to NFT games is centralized, giving the developers and publishers full control over all that happens within their NFT games.
The financial reason behind this’s to get the enormous amounts of dollars produced by the purchase of in game content, electronic items, and subscriptions – though it also implies that the majority of gamers have very little opportunities to take part in the worth with no professionalization.
This traditionally stolid model of ownership and profit sharing continues to exist, but with the advent of so called NFT games, it might be about to go through a paradigm shift. This particular video game type allows players to ‘realistically’ earn and own digital assets that they are able to later sell independently of the game.
Play-to-Earn may put the digital identities of gamers in their hands, assets and ownership.
If individuals are devoting significant time, personal resources and attention to digital environments, it’s crucial to build faith in the viability of their digital goods and presence, as well as economic resilience. Early implementations show that this can be achieved through blockchain technology, which can guarantee digital trust as well as a decentralized storage of information through cryptography.
Blockchain technology is being utilized in a number of industries from financial services to video NFT games are no different. The NFT games rely on blockchain technology to produce wealth, such as in the form of non-fungible tokens (or NFTs). A non – transferable token (NFT) is a digitally protected ownership claim for a single, non – transferable electronic asset. In practice, NFTs is able to take on a number of types inside virtual environments, which includes ornamental, land, goods, and people customization components like digital clothing. The players earn the most valuable things by doing extremely well within the game and might then sell them on their own terms for real – world cash.
The revolution comes from the decentralized integrity and protection of these electronic goods that may now transcend traditional proprietary, stadial ownership and discretion of a company or even a government. As an example, in-game resources from pay – to – win games could be traded freely on markets both within and outside the game rather than relying on permission or regulations from publishers or any other third parties.
Not too long ago, a number of communities have emerged, showing the potential for NFT games to help create a new economy. Moreover, the computer game Axie Infinity “clearly shows that this is much more than just a pipe dream. The popular play – to – earn system has grown from 4,000 to two million monthly active users in a few months, with specific popularity in the Philippines and Venezuela. For people in countries like these in the Global South, the cash they are able to make in the electronic realm is considerably more than the income they are able to produce within their local physical economy.
In addition, ancillary scholarship platforms,’ like Yield Guild Games, which allow and train players in developing economies to take part in NFT games, have attracted considerable investment and developed to become billion-dollar companies in a matter of months, surpassing the value of a lot of the most widely used video games. By globalizing the marketplace for game – based non – financial transactions this fashion, NFT games and their related platforms demonstrate frictionless financial opportunity and meritocratic participation across borders. The year 2021 is upon us and our planet appears to be flatter than ever before.
However, for the time being, it is worth pointing out that NFT games do not completely remove centralization inherent in them: They still require the power of the publisher to define, issue and regulate the product which eventually turns into an NFT. The biggest promise of NFT games is in their ability to decentralize markets for creation, exchange and ownership of digital assets, along with the potential produced when these marketplaces are linked to the traditional economic system and fiat currencies, enabling players to transform their digital time, earnings and effort into physical disposable income.
For those who believed, owning and taking part in crucial elements of these new worlds generate significant financial benefits. a lot of whom are going to be from developing countries which jumped on the chance when it presented itself.
The concept of NFT games might provide a new and flexible way of earning money for gamers. It also raises some questions about the dangers of the electronic economy, which risks creating “people as a service”: Insecurity of employment, insecure links between workers and companies and a lack of social safety nets. These are all elements that policymakers have to think about given the present disproportional representation of freelancers within the creative sector.
