Crypto and NFT Gaming on the Verge of Mass Adoption

The gaming industry is expected to be worth almost $200 billion in terms of revenue in 2021. Blockchain and NFT technologies make a natural partner for gaming and they could be poised to take off.

At the moment it is just a niche market for NFT based gaming in which the tokens are integrated directly into the games. But things are slowly changing on that front with some huge money being raised for NFT platforms.

Crypto Games Getting Better

As reported by CryptoPotato on July 21, the NFT marketplace OpenSea raised $100 million putting it at a valuation of $1.5 billion and this could be just the start.

DeFiPrime has put together a list of the biggest names in crypto and NFT based games which include Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained, Zed Run, and Battle Racer. It concludes that NFT games may have the potential to become the standard for the gaming market if they continue to see enough attention and popularity.

“From there, it could be a very major change to the way people play games and could be as major as Doom was to the market or 3D was for environments.”

Shreyansh Singh, the head of gaming and NFTs at Ethereum layer 2 aggregator Polygon, also thinks the industry is poised to explode.

In mid-July, Polygon announced the launch of Polygon Studios. The new enterprise will be focused on helping to advance crypto gaming and NFTs enabling the platform to “bridge the gap between Web 2 and Web 3 gaming.”

👀 pic.twitter.com/urcUL9fc1g

— Polygon (@0xPolygon) July 15, 2021

Singh stated that everyone is looking at this space, including celebrities, brands, and sports leagues. However, many of the early blockchain-based games were not created by gaming developers. That is changing according to Singh who said that the new breed of games such as Axie Infinity and Zed Run are being developed by gamers.

Brink of Major Adoption

In mid-June, Los Angeles-based NFT game developer Mythical Games announced a $75 million Series B financing. It plans to use the fund to popularize ownership in games through playable NFTs. Singh stated:

“So maybe we are on the brink of major adoption, maybe in some time you will see a major wave of top-level games coming into this space.”

In a couple of years, he envisages a major studio like Electronic Arts or Activision launching a game with play-to-earn and NFT components, adding “after that, there’ll be no going back.”