‘Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. Examples include collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets.’
The video game industry in 2020 was worth a staggering $160 Billion, up from $90 Billion in 2016. At the same time, the video game industry is projected to reach $200 Billion in 2023. The total number of gamers amounted to over 2.5 Billion people in 2020 and is steadily increasing. Almost everyone has heard legendary titles such as World of Warcraft, League of Legends and FIFA football.
What all these games have in common is digital assets. The term digital assets encompasses weapon or character skins, boosts and even event tickets. The purpose of these digital assets is to enhance the gaming experience usually by personalising the gaming avatar. These digital assets have become a very profitable industry. In 2018 alone, Epic Games made $2.4 billion in revenue selling character skins in their free-to-play game Fortnite.
While digital assets are very present in everyday life, there is one key distinction between them and physical assets, which is the problem of ownership. In the case of physical assets, ownership of the asset is quite simple, as in most cases owners have the freedom to hold and transfer indefinitely. Digital assets are different as the game or platform developers may delete or alter the features of this asset.
How Blockchain comes into play
The solution to this problem lies in the revolutionary technology of blockchain. Blockchains provide a coordination layer for digital assets, giving users ownership and management permission. Blockchains add several unique properties to non-fungible assets that change the user and developer relationships with these assets. Blockchain has introduced specific Non-fungible token (NFTs) standards that guarantee this tokens will behave in a specific way and describe exactly how to interact with the basic functionality of the assets. The most famous token standards are ERC721 and ERC1155.
There has always been hype around NFTs, ever since Cryptokitties crashed the Ethereum network in late 2017. The NFT market has nevertheless never seen the growth it is seeing now. According to the Dapp Industry Report by DappRadar the market grew from 3 million dollars in December 2020 to 33 million dollars in January 2021.
This growth has been spearheaded by projects such as Hashmasks, a project that offers a collection of 16.384 artworks. The most expensive trade had a value of 420 ETH or more than 640 thousand dollars at the time of the auction. Another example is the basketball themed DApp NBA Top shop. In January it was the biggest NFT DApp, with the ten most expensive NBA Top Shot moments sold for a combined 624 thousand dollars. At the same time, NFTs are getting attention for spilling out of the blockchain space onto other markets as well. As an example, the Kings of Leon just released their new album as an NFT. Another very high profile recent story was the blockchain-powered multiplayer builder game My Neighbor Alice by Antler Interactive. As soon as the Alice token was launched on the Binance Smart chain it shot up to almost 30 dollars and reached a market cap of 600 millions dollars. At the same time, the famous auction house Christie’s revealed that the NFT fund Metapurse had purchased Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ for a record of $69.3 million. This shows that blockchain is spilling out to the entire world, digitalising even art.
The decentralised infrastructure that is currently being built will allow for revolutionary new projects and GGDApp is excited to be part of this movement!
How NFTs will work in the GGDApp ecosystem
NFTs will play a key role in the GGDApp ecosystem, as all our games, including Pirates 2048 and the Simracer Coin project have NFTs at their core. The Simracer Coin project revolves around Simthunder, a decentralised marketplace for simracing assets. While the sim racing ecosystem has already an economy of assets and services that are bought and sold, the market is fragmented.
Sim racers currently purchase mechanical setup files, car parts and other services such as racing lessons from each other. This is done through the legacy financial system and thus carries the disadvantages that accompany it. Our mission is to create a unified marketplace for all these assets and services each represented by unique blockchain backed NFTs. By representing car parts modification files and race awards with NFTs, players will have true ownership and control of these assets and will be able to trade them in a peer-to-peer fashion. Each racing event will generate its own NFTs that will be inextricably related to it. These will include memorabilia, awards, unique car parts, skins and trophies. NFTs relating to sports are currently in high demand and we envision the same for sim racing eSports.
NFTs also play a vital role in our Pirates 2048 game. They will represent collectibles that can be used to upgrade your ship and give you extra powers and abilities. Another kind are the pirate characters, each with its own abilities and powers, that you need to have to board other ships. Finally the survivor art NFTs, representing pieces related to the game story, will be picked up from the sea while playing the game. We have already minted our first NFT in testnet and are preparing for deployment on mainnet soon!
Besides Simracer coin and Pirates 2048, NFTs will also be in the core of our upcoming game, a blockchain based football manager that is coming out later this year.
We are really excited about what we’re building, thanks to our supporters, and believe the future will be great for gaming, NFTs and GG Dapp!
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