How NFTs Will Change Online Gaming

Online gaming has crawled out of the primordial ooze that is your grandmother’s basement and a world reserved for the tech-savvy super-nerd, and it’s become a mainstream past time. The improvement in computers, consoles and of course internet speeds have laid the foundation for the growth in the sector and breeding new concepts like gamer girls, eSports and twitch streamers. Gaming companies around the world have poured millions into this multibillion-dollar industry, and it’s only the beginning.

The only thing keeping online gaming back at the moment is the archaic payment methods available, either you have to use a credit card or prepay for an in-game currency which isn’t all that fungible at times, depending on the game you’re playing. One of the prime examples of this is V-bucks on Fortnite, which is used to purchase in-game items and allows for gaming customisation.

More players mean more monetisation

As the number of online players continues to increase and cost of running, producing and marketing these games to audiences, we see gaming companies look for new ways to monetise their products with digital items such as:

  • Special season passes for access,
  • In-game currency
  • DLC’s, in-game purchases,
  • Updated versions,
  • Special events
  • and Loot crates.

What was a blocker could be assisted by blockchain 

As you can tell, gaming requires a lot of transactions all with their unique requirements which adds to the complications for platforms and publishers to deal with and manage revenue streams. One way of handling the dynamic world of digital payments in gaming is with the use of Non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs.

blockchain a base for a NFT

An NFTs can be used by online games to issue unique digital items and collectables that are stored on the blockchain but provide ownership to each player. These tokens can either be a collectable item, an investment character, in-game items, weapons, or anything players could find valuable in a game.

Gaming economies are nothing new since many online games have already had their economies so by using blockchain to tokenise gaming assets is only seen as a natural progression of the ecosystem. The use of NFTs could potentially solve or mitigate the common problem of inflation that many games have as they want to manage the perceived value of each set of items in the game.

NFT’s could also be used to store characters or your digital identity, which is also essential to gamers. Your specific handle in the game could be reserved on the blockchain for no one to copy for example if you’re a famous gamer like Ninja or Pewdiepie. Gamers could also use this tech to build up accounts with gaming items and sell them wholesale to a player who wants to join but don’t want to do all the hard work.

Storing identification and ownership data on the blockchain would increase privacy and data integrity for many people in the gaming world

NFT are on its way

It may be seen as a novelty technology now, but as the concepts can be scaled, more companies will try to apply it to their ecosystems. The application of NFTs with popular franchise games and the ability to engage with players online makes it a match made in heaven for players.

NFT’s Reduce the need for publishers to manage payments and increase the use of in-game items as well as assigning a real-world value on specific times, items and usage of a digital item.

The NFT model also can keep users in your system for longer, improving playing time and provide them with more value through NFTs and NFT marketplaces.