Should gaming embrace NFT? Both sides of the debate weigh in

digitaltrends.com:

It was the frequency of those three little letters on my Twitter feed that originally caught my eye. “NFT.” I had no idea what that was or what it meant, but it was showing up everywhere. Within days, half of my feed was either kowtowing at the feet of this new technology or heralding it as the end of civilized society as we know it.

Between the praises and criticisms, I still couldn’t work out exactly what it meant. My Twitter feed is made up almost entirely of game designers, journalists, and other games-adjacent folks, so I knew it had to have some significance with games. Finding out exactly what it meant took me on an odyssey of promises, accusations, and entirely too much money.

NFTs have become a hot-button topic in the last few months, due in large part to many prominent game companies’ promises to incorporate them into their games and IPs at large — and the resulting fan backlash. In order to understand exactly what they are, who they’re aimed at, and what picture they’re painting of gaming’s future, I did quite a bit of research and spoke to advocates on both sides of the crypto spectrum.

An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unique, usually digital item that can’t be substituted for anything else. This lack of substitution is ostensibly what gives them their value: Each one is unique. NFTs are purchased with cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and are stored on a blockchain. They can be just about anything digital, but often take the form of art, music, videos, GIFs, or tweets.

Gaming examples include property within virtual spaces, like in the “user-generated world” of The Sandbox, or the videos and art that Konami is selling as part of Castlevania’s 35th anniversary.  In essence, when you purchase an NFT using