Creating Value For In-Game Assets
Since the very initiation of the NFT craze, many projects based on this blockchain technology have emerged in the market, be it art, music, or gifs. And video games are no exception to this trend.
NFTs are promising the advent of a new and exciting world to the video game industry, where players and developers enjoy more flexibility and benefit from the gaming economy (and their in-game items). All of this is enabled by NFT’s rising adoption, where they occupy increasingly more direct roles in the gaming economy.
This new evolution in gaming is helping shape a new meaning to the existing gaming experience offered by the current games. But before we delve into the hows and the whys, let’s explore the basics of NFTs, their use in the gaming industry, and finally how they are reshaping this industry through innovations like Smart NFTs and so on.
What are NFTs?
NFTs (or Non Fungible Tokens) are digital tokens made on the blockchain that represent unique items. In other words — no NFT can be replaced with another. The word “non-fungible” implies that they are completely unique, for which they cannot be exchanged for an identical token, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, where you can swap 1 BTC for another equivalent 1 BTC. They can be used for various purposes such as representing real-world assets like real estate, as a digital token of crypto art, or digital in-game assets.
With NFTs, swapping similar items is impossible, as they are unique. No two tokens ever match, and plus, they also store their buyer’s ownership rights thus creating transparency and trust among participants.
It’s easy to see how this can be applied to in-game items.
How are NFTs used in the gaming industry?
NFTs, due to their inherent ability of representing in-game assets, are a big game-changer (pun intended) in the gaming industry and are widely regarded as a new revolution in this area. Since NFTs are decentralized, their ownership (and any modification post ownership) cannot be influenced by any third parties like online game-item trading companies, developer influences, and so on, which ensure a big deal of freedom to the gaming community.
NFTs enable in-game items to have differentiating factors, based on their rarity, utility, cosmetics, and demand in the game. This gives gamers an incentive to collect and sell in-game items, both within and outside the games. Love that new power-up on your in-game car? You’ll no longer lose it if the game shuts down. Instead, you can simply port it to another game that supports its NFT on the blockchain. After all, now you own it, with your ownership recorded immutably on the blockchain.
NFTs also provide game developers a chance to earn revenue from their created products. Game developers also gain significant benefits from NFTs, as they can optimize the extent of monetization of their in-game assets, without any intermediary fees or processing charges at the whims of service providers. The results? Increased profitability and direct unfiltered interaction with consumers.
To implement NFTs within a game, the game developer(s) need to create smart contracts, which are basically self-executing snippets of code found on a blockchain, and make the governing basis of NFTs. A great example of this would be CryptoKitties — where the game, running entirely on smart contracts, found its fame largely due to its in-game NFT collectibility and even clogged the Ethereum network!
Altura: Where Blockchain Meets Gaming
In-game assets are clearly a major component of any video game, offering gamers the opportunity to truly own their digital items in the form of digitized asset tokens called NFTs, and trade them wherever they’d like.
It’s this spirit that Altura hopes to pioneer and take to new heights. Altura is an online platform that provides game developers a place to create, build, distribute, and transact Smart NFTs that represent in-game items. Altura is the first in the crypto-enabled gaming market to provide Smart NFTs.
Smart NFTs are the type of NFTs that possess dynamic features that change based on specific conditions. They are the next step towards making decentralized in-game assets mainstream and thereby provide a large range of opportunities that are not feasible with traditional NFTs.
Altura offers a simple and easy-to-use interface with APIs to create and distribute Smart NFTs in an open marketplace, using Altura’s own token, ALU.
One additional feature offered by Altura is loot boxes. These are a great source of revenue for many game developers. And as a matter of fact, they can be integrated with NFTs as well, since they basically comprise a name, description, icon, a list of potential item drop, and the probability percentage of an item being dropped, which thanks to Blockchain can be converted into NFTs.
It also recently released World’s First Smart NFT Collection — The Altura Penguins.
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