What Are NFT Games and How Do They Work?

Some offer a battling experience with collectible characters like CryptoBlades and Axie Infinity, and others use collectible cards like Sorare. Blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs figure heavily in plans for the metaverse, with virtual objects and land parcels represented by non-fungible tokens. It’s still Axie Infinity which has 2.8 million unique players every day.

How do NFTs work?

NFT games earn from players by charging for entry, for example you’ll need to buy an Axie creature pack to enter Axie Infinity (though you can now use a starter Axie for free but limited use). Or they take a percentage of NFT items bought and traded in-game. Yet NFT gaming can also embrace the ownership players could bring. Key to many games is the idea of customisation, this could be expanded to enable creators to make NFT-powered assets for their favourite games and sell them on a marketplace. In-game NFTs offer another way for you to generate an income through playing NFT games. Rather than earning a fungible ERC-20 token like SLP in Axie Infinity or SKILLS in CryptoBlades, you earn NFTs that represent collectible items.

Why do NFTs have value?

1. You can sell your in-game NFTs to other collectors and players and even earn tokens with play-to-earn models.
2. Most NFT games feature an internal maketplace to buy and sell items on a blockchain, but this means they can also be traded on the best NFT marketplaces outside of the game.
3. Quartz offers current players of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, it’s open-world tactical shooter, NFTs of new cosmetic items, often back-dated to reward long time players.
4. Well, they’re pretty complex, but the basic idea is that blockchains are a way to store data without having to trust any one company or entity to keep things secure and accurate.
5. A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art.

Another investor parted with $222,000 to purchase a segment of a digital Monaco racing track in the F1 Delta Time game. The NFT representing the piece of digital track allows the owner to receive 5% dividends from all races that take place on it, including entry ticket fees. Ethereum token standards were developed to achieve exactly this. These involve specific sets of smart contract functions that a token must be able to perform in order to be compatible with all other tokens, platforms and services in the broader Ethereum ecosystem. While NFTs themselves are exchangeable (in the sense that you can buy and sell NFTs from/ to other people) the unique traits of each NFT mean it has its own distinct value.

With NFT games, value is derived either from the NFT or token’s collectability or in-game utility. Breeders use SLP to breed new Axies, creating an economy for the item. Axie Infinity became particularly popular in the Philippines, where many users started to live off its play-to-earn model. Many players are making between $200 to $1000 (USD) per month, and some even more than that depending on the market price and time invested. Play-to-earn NFT games give users the chance to generate an income stream through playing. Typically, a player is rewarded with tokens and occasionally NFTs, earning more the longer they play.

How do NFT games make money?

Passionate enthusiasts and owners are collectively building out the lore, experiences, games, and other factors, all of which leverage the initial Loot NFTs. As an experiment in collective world-building, Loot NFTs provided a primitive for creators, developers, and users to build on top of. Developers could pick and choose which items to build upon and how the items would manifest within different adventures, ranging from series of loot-based raiding games to puzzle-solving quests. Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are certificates of ownership of a digital good made in limited numbers. Games aren’t just about the thing you play but the players you follow; the esports stars that make headlines and the developers making games possible.

The pathway offered by GameStarter means a community can be built before a game releases and gives developers time to be creative. NFTs enable players to take ownership of in-game items out of the hands of a game’s publisher. Items bought and earned on an NFT blockchain can, in theory, be used across games. So if, for example, Ubisoft closes Ghost Recon Breakpoint but launches a new Tom Clancy shooter, you could, in theory, transfer your ‘Clancy NFTs’ to this new game. As well as items players could also invest in NFTs of news skills or XP.

Treeverse

You can earn points to level up for every game you win, goal you score, or other events you complete. Play-to-earn gaming is helping crypto adoption, too; according to Axie Infinity co-founder Aleksander Leonard Larsen, half of the game’s players have never used any crypto application before. However, there are costs required to play the game, and before you can start, you must purchase three Axie NFTs—each of which can cost hundreds of dollars. In some countries, these “play-to-earn” games are already enabling gamers to make a living by playing video games, with scholarship programs and academies springing up to help players navigate this strange new world. Bridgeworld is the first game from TreasureDAO, an exciting eco-system that uses the MAGIC token as it’s currency. Think of TreasureDAO as the decentralised ‘Nintendo of the metaverse’ that hosts and connects a number of games together.

But NFTs place more power in players hands, and will enable them to sell items, and even earn a percentage from future resales. For those players who grew up by selling old games to pay for new, this is huge for a digital games era. Sorare is a fantasy football game with collectible, tradeable soccer players from real life. You create a five-player soccer team using either free cards for beginner players or purchasing tokenized cards.

Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5. Speaking on a panel discussion about the metaverse at Token2049 Axie Infinity’s co-founder Aleksander Leonard Larsen revealed 50% of its players had never used cryptocurrency before playing the game. This shows how NFT games can help develop the UX design and make blockchains accessible. As mentioned above, gamers are used to buying in-game items through microtransactions and season passes.

Leading crypto projects such as Ethereum recognized early on that there needed to be some form of standardization among newly created crypto tokens to establish interoperability. So someone created this site what is the distinction between the phrases capitalize and depreciate called The NFT Bay as a sort of art project, where they put up a torrent pointing to a 19TB ZIP file, which they said included every NFT on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. When real game developers like Ubisoft and the studio behind STALKER have said they’d integrate NFTs into their games… The companies have either had to scrap their plans entirely or severely tone down the amount of blockchain stuff in their games. Loot represents a radically different take on what NFT games can look like. Rather than relying on a single game with a core gameplay loop, Loot NFTs introduced a primitive that unleashed the creativity of its wider community.

While some people value NFTs for their collectibility, others want them for their utility. Many NFT games work like a trading card game, but not everyone who collects the cards intends to play. Game-fi has now created new NFT gaming economies that have changed how people can earn using NFTs. To make money, it’s not just about luck and collecting anymore; it’s also about playing too. Gods Unchained is an example of an NFT game that takes a familiar gameplay model and enhances it with blockchain technology. In games like Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra, players don’t fully own their cards.

This Ultimate Team example raises a key issue of concern for committed gamers. Those gamers with large wallets would be able to simply buy a great pre-made team and win trophies, earning NFTs as rewards and never look back. In some ways NFTs could drag in the worst aspects of real life football as the richest ‘clubs’ thrive. Want to know more about NFTs and the impact this new technology will have on art? Then don’t miss Vertex Week 2022, the ultimate virtual event for the digital art community.