LogFAQs > #961470601

And in the middle of PFP and Sports you have things like Gaming NFTs and other Art NFTs that vary widely across a spectrum depending on how exactly they are being implemented. If a popular digital artist decides to create a set of NFTs with their artwork it can be a good way for people who enjoy their artwork to support that artist. This provides some level of ownership for the purchaser, and it allows the artist to have a mechanism to get properly compensated for their work. All too often you hear of photographers and artists who see their work being used without their permission or without them being compensated and while that will still happen (obligatory "right click + save lololol") there will be others who will jump at the chance to support something of high quality. It's like how you can watch someone streaming on twitch for free or you can choose to pay $5 to be a subscriber and support the content that you aren't required to pay for.

There are entire games where NFT assets are integral to the functioning of the game. Most well known would be Axie Infinity, which is a strategic pet-battling game similar to pokemon where you have to own the asset of the pet to be able to participate in the game. And once you are playing the game you can earn rewards that can be sold to other players for a profit. In Axie in particular there is a large enough playerbase and demand for game assets that people in countries with a low enough cost of living have been able to actually make a living playing Axie full time. But similar to cryptopunks this is the exception and not the rule. Many other projects simply put "making a game" on their road map to make people believe it's the next Axie when in reality their team doesn't have the technical knowledge required to create something on that scale or have a large enough player base to be self-sustaining. If nobody is playing the game the money for it's economy wont exist. Or if a game has a lot of players, but they are ALL trying to earn+sell their assets there wont be anyone to sell to. It's similar to WoW gold, if nobody is buying the gold the price goes way down.

A promising looking NFT-Game project that is launching this year (beta for their gameplay is coming soon) is Avarik Saga (https://www.avariksaga.com/) which will be a turn-based JRPG style game. Currently there are 8888 characters and to play the game when it launches you will need to own at least 3 to make a party. You will earn in-game currency for owning the NFTs and for playing the game, and the plan is for the currency to be usable to breed the characters so there will eventually be more than the current 8.8K. When the project first released it's initial 8.8k characters (late september) it cost 0.1 ETH each to mint one. They sold out pretty quickly, but as often happens with these projects people who expected to make tens of thousands immediately became unwilling to hold so the price dropped throughout october and november until the floor price for the cheapest available avarik was around 0.015 ETH (only 15% of the original cost). As the game has released more project updates and appears to be getting closer to release the price has rebounded with the cheapest avarik currently being 0.092 ETH, but many of the more rare ones selling for several times that amount.

But for every NFT Game like Avarik, which seems poised to actually deliver a quality product, there are dozens of others that fail to delivery anything. And these are just the small start-up game projects that will utilize blockchain assets as a core component of their gameplay. It sounds like this topic is more talking about the trend of AAA gaming companies trying to shoehorn a digital asset into their game without really understanding the space. For example Ubisoft Quartz, creating an in game skin or item that will function exactly the same for everyone is not something that particularly needs a blockchain asset to verify unique ownership of.

The bottom line is there are simply too many different examples of good and bad implementations to make a sweeping statement about the future of NFTs one way or the other. All you can do is identity the projects that are the good examples and figure out what they are doing right to drive the technology in a positive direction, and steer clear of the vast majority of projects that are little more than FOMO inducing cash grabs. Personally I navigated the space fairly well in 2021 and showed a profit on the year for the NFTs I bought and sold, but it's very easy to lose money if you aren't being cautious.