When one thinks of the various use-cases that cryptocurrencies can have, gaming would probably not come to mind immediately. However, it should, as this industry has been steadily growing in popularity over the last decade and it looks poised to experience even more adoption on a massive scale thanks to crypto and non-fungible tokens.
In fact, just this year, many have expected the gaming industry to be worth a whopping $200 billion, give or take, in overall revenue. NFT and blockchain technologies would thus be a logical partner for the world of gaming, and some games have already begun making preparations to incorporate these new innovations. As gaming is almost always digital nowadays, it makes all the sense in the world for this partnership to take place.
For now, NFT-oriented gaming could be considered to be a niche market, one in which the aforementioned non-fungible tokens would be integrated into the games directly. However, the market might not be such a niche for long, as a substantial amount of money is currently being raised for various non-fungible token platforms even as we speak.
A new era of gaming
OpenSea, a well-known NFT marketplace, had managed to generate $100 million as of last month, which puts the P2P marketplace’s valuation to a total of $1.5 billion. What is even more astounding is that this could only be the beginning.
Among some of the top NFT and crypto-based games, we have Gods Unchained, Battle Racer, Zed Run, and Axie Infinity. The success experienced by these examples indicates that such games do have the potential and capacity to truly be the standard as far as the gaming market goes, provided that an adequate amount of popularity and attention is continuously given. Polygon’s Shreyansh Singh has stated that if this kind of success continues, then we could witness an explosion in both popularity and usage for the gaming industry, the likes of which we have not seen in a long time.
Is crypto-gaming becoming mainstream?
Around mid-June, Mythical Games (an NFT game developer based in Los Angeles) had revealed a Series B funding round of $75 million. The game developer intends to utilize the fund in order to increase the popularity of ownership in games via playable non-fungible tokens. This had prompted Shreyansh to reiterate his stance that crypto and NFT based gaming is about to explode and that adoption of such games on a massive level is more than likely to occur.
Singh had even gone as far as to claim that major studios such as Activision or Electronic Arts may eventually launch games that are compatible with crypto and NFTs, and if that happens, then we will have truly reached the point of no return.