Video games, fashion, art… but why are NFTs everywhere?

Dematerialized music, a digital painting, an accessory in a video game or a designer dress. Anything can become an NFT. These “non-fungible tokens” or “non-fungible tokens” are first and foremost ownership certificates that ensure you are the sole owner of a digital asset. NFT works do not exist physically but only in the form of a virtual code.

Impossible to keep them in a bank vault. With NFTs, the safe is the blockchain, this technology claiming to be ultra-secure and used both to trace and to list assets such as cryptocurrencies. At best, NFTs can be showcased and exhibited in an online art gallery. Watch the video above.

One of the most popular NFTs is “Bored Ape”, a series of drawings that depict nothing but a primate but are driving the counters crazy. PSG star Neymar acquired two for the modest sum of one million dollars. In a lower budget, the first SMS in history was sold for 100,000 euros. A witness to history that could have rested in a museum but become an NFT sold at auction.

In the world of video games, studios as imposing as Square Enix, EA Sports or the French Ubisoft are also trying to take advantage of NFTs. In particular with the concept of “play to earn”, literally “play to earn money”. This is the case of the simulation game “Sorare” which made the success of the tricolor startup of the same name. The goal is to compose your football team and make it win on virtual fields. To do this, you must first buy cards bearing the image of real players. Their rating follows the real performances of these pros in the league. A Cristiano Ronaldo card has already sold for several hundred thousand euros.

And if you prefer dogs to soccer stars, the “Dogami” game has it all. This “Tamagotchi” version 2022 must be released in the spring. The first 8,000 NFT companions will be available for adoption and sale on February 22. The better you educate them, the more you will be rewarded in “Doga”, the cryptocurrency created for the game. Here, its course evolves with the amount of active players.

It remains to be seen how gamers will welcome this type of game. “There is distrust from players who see NFTs as one more reason for these companies to make moneyobserves Brice N’Guessan, editor of Video Games Magazine. Some have already had to backtrack.”

“Secondly, if tomorrow we put limited edition customization tools – which is also the principle of NFTs – not everyone will have access to them, we will have to go to a second market and the speculative aspect is not not necessarily clear.” Be careful, because NFTs and cryptocurrencies follow the logic of the stock market. They can pay off big or suddenly lose all their value.

In contrast, “NFTs could make it possible to say ‘this game belongs to you’ and you could thus resell it, which is not currently the case with a dematerialized game. The problem at this stage is that no publisher is talking about this an interesting possibility for owners of non-physical games”finds Brice N’Guessan.

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