The Boost from Blockchain Gaming

The rise of blockchain play-to-earn gaming has been a catalyst for the adoption of NFTs. According to games market analytics firm Newzoo, the global games market will generate revenues of US$218.8 billion in 2024. A third of the world’s population are gamers and the Asia-Pacific region is the largest market for video gaming, according to Statista. Gamers are accustomed to interacting in a virtual world with game assets such as skins or power-ups. Players can potentially win tokens or NFTs and trade them or sell them on marketplaces for fiat money.

Gaming is seeing an increase in the use of NFTs. Popular NFT-based blockchain game Axie Infinity clocked more than US$126 million in sales in January 2022 and is the top NFT collection by all-time sales volume, ahead of the avatar NFT collection CryptoPunks which saw around half the sales.

Businesses and game developers have seen how blockchain and NFTs are transforming gaming and are entering this arena. Microsoft in January 2022 announced that it was buying gaming giant Activision Blizzard in a US$68.7 billion push to grow its gaming business and position itself as a developer of metaverse platforms.

Cryptocurrency platform Binance in October 2021 launched its new Initial Game Offering arm to enable investments in NFT gaming projects. Helen Hai, head of NFT and fan token at Binance, predicts that with the rise of GameFi, traditional free-to-play developers will go into blockchain games.

“This game genre will not be driven by crypto native developers anymore and we will see big developers and publishers enter the space,” she said.

As with collectibles, the shift to NFTs has faced pushback due to concerns about the carbon footprint, as gaming giant Ubisoft found out in December 2021 when it launched Ubisoft Quartz, an NFT platform on the Tezos blockchain.