NFT Use Cases: Gaming

Every day, there are 2 million people who play with the little blobs of Axie Infinity, which now has a valuation of $3 billion. “Gaming is really exciting, as you already have billions of people who are buying digital goods inside of games,” said Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, the largest NFT platform. The reason we haven’t yet seen an even wider adoption, said Finzer, is that “the development cycle is a little longer with games than with simpler arts and collectible projects. There’s a little more of a delay.” He imagines we’ll see the fruits of these developments within a year or two.

Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures (a U.K.-based blockchain VC and accelerator lab), was originally encouraged by research showing that “people spend five times more in a blockchain game than in a conventional game.” He said that skeptics originally “poo-pooed” this research, but then came Axie. The Axie juggernaut is proof, said Burke, that if the gamer can exit the game and cash out with crypto, and if they’re free to “do whatever the hell they want with the money,” then they’ll spend more money. “It feels really obvious now,” he said, predicting that Axie is just the very beginning of a much larger boom in gaming that will be “huge in the next decade.”