As gaming producers start to make more of their products available for play on the blockchain, NFT gaming business models may prove to be an appealing innovation.
According to Urvit Goel, vice president of global business development for gaming at Polygon, games that use nonfungible tokens (NFT) have an inherent advantage over conventional games that don’t permit players to trade their in-game goods.
Goel discussed Polygon’s (MATIC) efforts to support the proliferation of NFT games in Seoul last week. He also discussed the reasons behind the aggressive entry into the market of South Korean game producers Neowiz and Nexon.
The traditional economic model that NFT games compete with maybe intrinsically inferior, according to one of the primary points Goel stated. In traditional video games, players generally spend real money on in-game purchases, but they are unable to resell those purchases for a profit.
However, users can purchase products as nonfungible tokens and sell them when they have finished playing most games in the gaming finance (GameFi) area. Goel referred to the conventional business model as “money in, no money out,” and he highlighted that players have to be able to get part of the money they invested in a game back.
“We just want to give users the ability to own the content they’re buying. And if they choose to sell it, great if they choose to keep it, great […] But even if you get a penny back out, it’s better than nothing, right?”
Goel claimed to have seen unmistakable signs that traditional game publishers are getting ready to make major forays into GameFi, beginning with South Korea’s Nexon, the owner of the MapleStory franchise. According to mmorpg, a gaming news media outlet, it stated in June that it would release a version of its flagship game on-chain dubbed MapleStory N.
In order to put both new and old titles on-chain, Neowiz of South Korea and Polygon have partnered.
In order to “prove that they’re still inventive,” he said, the entry of such huge corporations is causing “a little bit of a domino effect” in the sector. Goel made a suggestion that the executives of the large companies entering the blockchain market must have a lot of faith in the technology because otherwise, they wouldn’t prepare their best games for GameFi.
“These developers don’t have to come on blockchain to have successful businesses. They’re already generating hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of revenue in traditional web teaming.”
Goel’s ideas about blockchain and gaming are consistent with those of Anthony Yoon of ROK Capital, who claimed that GameFi and cryptocurrency are a “natural fit” for publishers.
Goel’s optimism about the promising future of NFT gaming and GameFi is influenced in part by the excitement in the communities. Although he claimed he had concrete evidence to back up his assertion, he is of the belief that many members of sizable communities with “millions of followers” are enthusiastic about the new game products being introduced to their channels.
“So to me, that data speaks a lot louder than an article written by a journalist about why ‘X’ NFT’s will be good.”
