The NFT space is red hot now with many projects boasting multi-million dollar sales of single NFT’s and floor prices north of 40 ETH ($120k+).
One of the factors driving the mania in NFT’s is the growing realisation of the importance that NFT’s will play in the metaverse to come.
Traditional Game Add-ons and Content
Nearly all of today's games are entirely self-contained worlds developed and controlled by a single publisher. All the items in the game and all the additional content is either made by the publisher or approved by the publisher.
All or the majority of the profit of add-on content for the games is retained by the publisher and any attempt to sell content outside of that ecosystem is usually greeted with a ban.
What is the Metaverse?
The Metaverse is a world in which all games are interconnected and the content in those games common to all. Think of a hub world connecting all other games, where you are represented by the same avatar in all games.
You can walk out of a lobby in Call of Duty, cross the street and walk into another building to play Fortnite, all without changing your outfit or appearance. This is the promise of the metaverse that is so well depicted in Ready Player One.
But how will all the different developers agree on a data format to allow content to be exchanged between games? That sounds like a massive undertaking, but that is where NFT’s come in.
What are NFT’s
When most people think of NFT's, they probably think they are just expensive JPEG's. But all NFT's are something much more than that. To make it possible for platforms like OpenSea to be able to display images and metadata and allow for the sale and transfer of them, they all have to conform to a common standard.
This standard in the Ethereum blockchain, and even in derived chains such as Binance Smart Chain, is the ERC-721 standard.
ERC-721 describes some common functions that all NFT's that meet the standard need to follow. This includes simple information such as the name and a mechanism to transfer them, but also includes a method to query the properties of the NFT.
This query returns a JSON description of the NFT along with a link to an image of the NFT. ERC-721 is what makes NFT's possible, and changes them from JPEG's to fully-fledged objects that can both describe themselves to the world and interact with the world via clearly defined interfaces.
Onto the Metaverse
If you take NFT's which are interchangeable objects with properties, a clearly defined owner, and mechanisms to interact with the world then you have the makings of a standard that will allow all games to interact with the same content. NFT's are also linked to a known digital identity in the form of a wallet address and a single wallet can contain hundreds of NFT's.
There are already some early games that are making a play to be the gaming hub of the future. The two most common ones are The Sandbox and Decentraland. Both of these games contain many different gaming experiences and are integrating many different NFT community projects.
For example, Decentraland contains a yacht that you can only board if you have a Bored Apes NFT in your wallet. I've personally been to an Alison Wonderland concert in a Cathedral in Decentraland that was only accessible to me because I had an NFT egg in my wallet from her Wonderland NFT project. Ready Player One isn't as far away as you might think.
Footnote: This content was provided to me by @steddyman who is attempting to get a project off the ground. Details with be forthcoming. As he has barely a presence on HIVE he asked me to format the text, with my usual styling and promote it for him.
I have added @steddyman as a beneficiary of this post and any others in line with this one. He will be the one responding to any comments, I will be dishing out comment votes.
I thought this was a slight departure for you! I look forward to the day when we all love in the metaverse and can kill who we please with mad abandon :0)
I have talked to him about this at length. I love gaming but am playing less and less as its.. well a waste of time. Add some tokens that contain tangibility for doing certain things in the game and it becomes much more attractive.
When will the big boys like Ubisoft jump in? It only takes one and the rest will skittle in.
It totally would be a snowball effect.
I have found myself playing less and less too. Possibly because my Xbox did am update and fucked itself meaning I had to spend half an hour fannying about to get it working again which I wasn't pleased with.
I want a next gen console but at the moment the price is putting me off
I relented and paid a swindler £525 for a PS5 and love it.., but now need to dump the PS4 on someone preferably closer to Xmas.
November will be a good time to get a good price. I am hoping to catch done kind of deal near Christmas for the Xbox one. Someone usually comes out with something. I hope they have some games out by then though!
!PIZZA
I don't know about Xbox, but all the PS4 stuff works off an external drive. I got a 5Tb one for peanuts.. and partially filled it up. The games work better on the '5' than the '4'.
That's a good idea. All the games are meant to run amazingly on the new gear but I have played all the ones I want to death, even my beloved Skyrim!
@slobberchops! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @meesterboom.
Did you know Pizzabot speaks Spanish if you use the command ESPIZZA? (1/20)
Metaverse sounds so appealing and when you think of the technological resources humanity currently has, it would be a pity not to have metaverses. The blending of the real and virtual worlds is inevitable. In regards to NFTs, it is crystal clear that the technology is here to stay, but there a lot of so called jpeg NFTs which are definitely in a price bubble.
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Yep, lots of useless projects will go to zero. The strength is in the quality of the community and the commitment of the devs. If they are in this for the long haul, then values will continue to rise.
Can you imagine in 30 years when the metaverse is as common with our grandkids as the internet is today, what someone will think of an avatar of a bored ape which will be universally recognised as where it all started and will cost 10's of millions to acquire?
The guys at The Uplift World have started offering tokens to the users who visit their Minecraft-based metaverse linked to WAX blockchain. They are defining all the economic rules in-world and are doing a pretty nice job since they launched.
They still have lots of room to grow but they are doing a pretty good job creating a Metaverse for all the WAX community to hang around, have fun, and now get some WAX crypto.
That sounds awesome. Jack Dorsey who owns twitter is a huge crypto advocat and recently added BTC and Ethereum addresses as fields for your profile picture. The next step will be letting you select verified profile pictures from your NFT wallet and showing a tick to show you own it.
I think it is only a matter of time before Microsoft and Sony do the same, then your online prescense will be your NFT across multiple platforms. That will drive massive adoption in the space.
That is pretty awesome. I did a writeup on Decentraland when it was first starting out. I didn't have the spare funds to invest in it back then. I wish I had. I am happy to see how much it has expanded and grown over the years. NFTs are definitely going to be around for a while!
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It isn't too late. We are still incredibly early in this space.
Very true! I am spread across a handful of NFT games pretty heavily at the moment. Most of them are over on the WAX side of things, but I was in Splinterlands fairly early.
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I was in Splinterlands in Alpa and bought 5 packs but couldn't find a guide on how to play it. So I forgot all about it until a month ago. I wish I had played it then and bought packs all along.
I had so many alpha cards that I sold for so cheap a long time ago. I am kicking myself over all that. It was a huge mistake on my part.
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A time machine would be epic wouldn't it, so long as only you had it :)
If an NFT is just a picture or other media then it is worth whatever people will want to pay for it, as with all art. Anything in limited supply can be attractive to collectors. Just see what an old comic can go for and that would have been pennies originally. In-game NFTs can help you make progress in the game and have a slightly different sort of value.
As for NFTs across platforms/games, that could get interesting. What if you import a machine gun into a swordplay game?
It just seems for a lot of these that you are reliant on some centralised source to keep the NFT 'alive'. Art with an ownership certificate on the blockchain may last, but if a game is shut down then you don't really have anything.
Interesting times.
Hey Steve. Long time no speak. How are you.
Completely agree on the worth, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Money is only a piece of paper or plastic, but it has value because we have all agreed it does.
You can imporant a machine gun into a swordplay game, but then it would likely represent a sword in that game. Because the NFT is an authenticated digital ID, that ID can be interpreted differently in every game.
If the game is shutdown, you still have the NFT, and that NFT will have historical value and scarcity.
Sorry I didn't respond to this before. Good to see you on Hive.
Money is likely to retain value due to wide usage. NFTs are still a tiny niche, but games may make them more mainstream. Most people have little idea what they are and stories of massive energy usage will put them off. Of course those on Hive do not have that issue. I own lots via the games plus some artworks I've bought. They are a bit like 'collectors editions' you see everywhere as it is artificial scarcity. An interesting business model and I'm happy to see some artists doing well from it as it can be tough for them to earn generally.
Hope things are good with you. I'll check out your post soon.
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BEER.Damn, I'm not sure I want to get a world with a metaverse, probably my brain is too rusty for all this shit.
And like a real fart, when I first heard about the sale of NFT at auction for a couple of million dollars, my first thought was: Wow, someone has come up with a great way to launder money and evade taxes.
I am sure that my so narrow-minded and not progressive views are connected with envy... :)
I don't think you'll have much choice than to come along for the ride in a few years :)
Well... maybe... Although, I'm one of those boring dudes who doesn't have a single console. And the last game I played was WOW, was about 5 years ago.
Perhaps I will become involved in this huge gaming industry thanks to NFT. First of all, in order to earn money. On the other hand, there are enough ways to make money outside of the digital world, for example, by killing people ;)
By the way. I liked your last blog post. It's sad that you don't publish anymore, but I understand and share your opinion.
Thanks for that. I'll start writing some more in the coming weeks. I got deep into other crypto related subjects and forgot all about Hive for a while.
I loved WOW back in the day. WOW with a crypto marketplace would be incredible.
This is good news! I'm watching you -_-
I am sure that nfts will play a crucial part in the industry in the next few years, we just have to wait and see.
Undoubtedly. Going to be massive and these are the early relics. In a few years they will have even more value.
NFT is worth it, its the future of money regulation
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Metaverse is like a parallel universe.