NFTS AND GAMING: THE PERFECT MATCH?
Hello, I’m Claire Cawthorn, Chief Marketing Officer of HeliconNFT, a play-to-earn NFT ecosystem that gives gamers the power to monetize their in-game assets by tokenizing them into NFTs and allowing them to play with these NFTs in amazing blockchain games on our platform.
Throughout my whole career in the tech space, I’ve had the real pleasure of seeing how the power dynamic between businesses and their consumers has slowly shifted. It’s argued that every product is now a service, and every service is now an experience that is completely defined by the consumers themselves. The power is in the customer’s hands. Just look at Uber, Airbnb and Amazon. Now let’s add blockchain technology into the mix, and we really have something exciting and game-changing.
Speaking of blockchain technology, I’m sure you’ve all heard of NFTs recently, even if you’re not quite sure what they are. Perhaps you’ve seen a meme about a CryptoPunk selling for $7.58m, or a post on your Instagram feed about Snoop Dog’s whopping $17m NFT collection. What the hell are these NFTs? How are some of them worth so much? And what’s all the fuss about? Whatever they are (and we’ll get to that), the hysteria is real and undeniable – they are completely revolutionising everything as we know it, from gaming to social media, to film and art. NFTs allow people to do the unthinkable and the previously impossible.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are simply digital assets that cannot be replicated. They are completely unique. I’m sure you didn’t know that you can NFT anything. A selfie of yourself. A movie. A piece of art. A weapon or skin in a video game. Your brain downloaded and turned into AI. Literally anything.
Unlike sought-after pieces of art, NFTs can’t be faked. If you were to buy a physical piece of art, for example, it would have to go through a rigorous authentication process, and even then, its genuineness might well be disputed. This is not the situation with NFTs. There are no ifs or buts – the uniqueness of the NFT is an indisputable fact (thanks to blockchain technology). This creates an incredibly transparent and fair landscape when it comes to buying and selling your digital assets. It can also make your NFTs extremely valuable.
When it comes to gaming, it’s a similar story. Up until now, gamers don’t actually own their in-game assets. If the game shut down tomorrow, all those fancy weapons and skins they have worked very hard for would be lost forever. Not only that, but they also can’t monetize these assets, making them essentially worthless (despite their possible rarity within the game).
NFTs completely change the power dynamic here and are completely revolutionising the gaming landscape. If a gamer tokenizes their in-game assets and turns them into an NFT, not only is their ownership undeniable, they also have full control to buy and sell them as they please, on any platform, between any game. Much like Uber, Airbnb and Amazon, this is a complete power shift away from the business and toward the consumer. The fact there are nearly 3 billion gamers in the world, and with a growing base of users showing an affinity to both virtual gaming and decentralized assets, we have the perfect catalyst for the mainstream adoption of NFT gaming.
So is it fair to say, blockchain and NFTs are changing the game?
