Last Year versus now
As I look out at the NFT landscape this year compared to last year, I noted a growing narrative about gamers and NFTs.
Last year the big story was that gamers hated NFTs. Like all such narratives it was assumed that All gamers hated NFTs, when in fact it was some gamers, and a poorly defined percentage.
So NFT supporters didn’t know how many gamers hated NFTs and they didn’t know if this was a vocal minority or a silent majority.
But this year I can already see how the narrative is changing and possibly being managed by NFT supporters to make NFTs more palatable to all gamers, including the previous NFT haters.
I think this is being accomplished by making it less about money, and more about gamers property rights. So allow me to unpack this topic a bit.
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Money, money, money…money.
This is the refrain to a very popular song from the sixties. It escapes me at the moment who wrote and sang this song.
But I think it’s fair to say this was a big theme for NFTs last year.
NFTs burst on the cryptocurrency scene as JPEGs of various kinds, and the theme was basically buy low and sell high.
Along with this theme, Play2Earn games like Axie Infinity and Splinterlands introduced to the world and thousands of gamers a way to make money in a world-wide economy which was shut down by the governments coronavirus policies, which had many workers idled at home.
Splinterlands alone raced to over one million new accounts, and there are several other similar sized games and some which claim to be larger.
Most of these are new entrants, relatively speaking into the gaming industry.
But we also saw some pushback against NFTs being incorporated into some popular games, and companies which issued press releases one day about releasing NFTs were forced to retract those statements the next day.
Suddenly anti-NFT gamers were a force to be reckoned with, but no one really knew how many were opposed to NFTs.
There was little or no way to determine if they were a vocal minority or a silent majority or something in between.
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Property Rights, or Power to the Gamers
This year the narrative has changed and taken on a more populous appeal.
Populous in terms of it’s no longer just about the money.
Now it’s about property rights for gamers, as in gamers have the right to own the items they win in the games, and with that right of ownership comes the right to transfer these items to others. This can be for free or for a price.
Now NFTs are not just about the money, now NFTS were about giving gamers the ability to control the items they work hard to earn inside video games.
It is a form of impowerment called Power to the People.
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Immutable X
Immutable X is a company built on an idea, the idea that gamers should own the in game items like clothing, weapons, etc and be able to trade them with other gamers.
Immutable saw NFTs as the perfect solution for establishing ownership which could be traced and verified on the blockchain.
The blockchain has infinite capacity, when built correctly, so it was capable of performing this task.
Immutable took up the cause of helping game developers make the transition to creating NFTs for in game items.
Immutable X was a NFT platform that saw the potential for scaling this new video game economy to millions of transactions.
Immutable has devoted itself to this new video game economy, which gives gamers control over the in-game items.
This new narrative is called Power to the People, and the People are gamers.
Summary and closing thoughts
So the narrative for NFTs is changing from being about money, to being about property rights.
This changed narrative has converted some NFT opponents to NFT proponents, and has helped accelerate the change of video games from strictly play for fun, to some being play for money, and of course it’s also about property rights.
Although the jaded person might think that property rights, especially individual property rights are mainly amount money. But that’s another discussion altogether.
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What do you think?
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