The desire to find and collect rare and unique items exists in the real world as much as in the gaming world. Car collectors are looking for the old vintage cars that don’t exist. Comic collectors are always looking for first editions. If you’re a card collector of any kind, you will find yourself looking for first editions, reruns, reprints, and misprints along with full collections or individual pieces to complete your incomplete collection (NFTs can help there too!).

Video games take this feeling and multiply it by infinity with items that could never exist in the real world. Like a special Iron Man suit from the Avengers game. Turning these into NFT’s is just the next logical step, considering that the first NFT was used in a video game!

Yes! That’s right! The first NFT used commercially was in a video game. This video game is called CryptoKitties, and it allows you to buy, trade, and sell digital kittens with other players around the world. The company that led this was Dapper Labs and they earned over $40 million since the debut in 2017.

Video games have been using the concept of Fungible and Non-Fungible Tokens for years, creating perceived value on digital assets within their games.

But this is only in a virtual world within the constructs of a game. How could this apply to the real world?

Games often have special skins, weapons, abilities, items, etc, that are released at different times of the year, or earned through very specific tasks. These rare items can usually be earned by anyone as long as they log in during a time frame or accomplish a previously established objective. Once this has been accomplished, the user now owns a new item that they can wield, just like the thousands of other players.

With NFT’s becoming more popular, some items could become a lot more rare, even one-of-a-kind. Imagine a game with one sword, like one ring to rule them all, but this sword does ultimate damage. In order to get it though you have to go through exceptional challenges, but if you do get it – it’s the only one – digitally noted that YOU are the one and only owner. You could sell it, you could show it off, you could kick everyone’s butt with it – the choice is yours. THAT is the power of the NFT. Even if you stop playing the game, lose everything within the game itself – you’d still own the NFT on the blockchain. You could sell it to another player and make real world money. It takes a gamified idea and brings real world intrinsic value to it.

There are already some major sales going on with NFTs in the video game world:

• The Hyperion Card from God’s Unchained is a digital online trading card that was minted as a one-of-a-kind card by the game’s developers. It sold for 137 Ethereum which was a little more than $60,000 at the time of the sale.
   
• In the digital game Crypto Kitties, Dragon is one of the pets. Now every pet in the game is unique but the price paid for Dragon Kitty was 600 Ethereum, or nearly $1.3 million dollars. Maybe the world’s most expensive cat of all time?
   
• Instead of buying a real car (or several), one player in the digital racing game F1 Delta Time bought the digital asset of The Australia Edition 2020 for more than $400,000.

The cool thing with NFTs is that most people spend money within the game anyway, but all of the money spent is lost when they stop playing a particular game. With an NFT the money is not lost, it is an investment, meaning you really could be making money by gaming – and isn’t that the true dream?

Games that don’t currently include NFTs will eventually because the market will drive it. Why would someone choose a game where they can lose their money? Investment gaming is the wave of the future.

And that’s the best part of the video game industry — the consistent pushing of limits. That’s the point of next gen consoles, that’s part of creating a new game, new mods and now – new non-fungible tokens. Don’t blink – NFTs will be everywhere faster than you think!