Golden era for blockchain gaming ahead of us. Big gaming companies are investing into NFT and P2E concepts.

Hello my friends,

I want to share with you some exciting news which I collected from various gaming news portals. It seems that big "traditional" gaming companies are investigating now, how to get involved into NFT and play-to-earn businesses and they have serious and confirmed plans to introduce those mechanics to their existing projects as well as develop completely new blockchain games utilizing NFTs and play-to-earn concepts. I believe, it is obviously good message for entire blockchain gaming industry and for me, it looks like big opportunity for all the projects which either are already live or yet under development.

Let's have a quick review, what's going on.

NC Soft
Starting from first official confirmation, largest South Korean gaming company - NC Soft, creator of titles such as Lineage, Guild Wars, Balde&Soul and Aion, in the investors earning call announced their plans to both introduce play to earn mechanics to their existing game portfolio, as well as develop completely new blockchain based games, starting that from 2022.

NCSoft's Chief Financial Officer Hong Won-jun said at an earnings call on Nov. 11 that the company has already completed technology reviews on the creation of its own cryptocurrency available for its NFT-based, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG).
The games, to be released in the first half of 2022 at its earliest, will allow users to make money by trading their game items for a cryptocurrency, or a type of NFTs.

NC Soft has really gorgeous MMORPO IPs in their portfolio, so looking how they want to enchance them with p2e and NFTs would be something really interesting. Of course, completely new projects are also interesting to follow to do not mismatch any early adoption phase. Let's see what they will bring in 2022 to the table.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft announced that they foresee big potential in blockchain gaming, therefore they will not only invest into this area, but also they plan to develop their own games utilizing NFTs and play-to-earn model. They are not yet any official project announcements, however we can expect some leaks or even official teasers in 2020 also.

Epic Games

Valve and it's Steam platform does not allow to publish any blockchain game on Steam and all existing and future titles will get banned from the platform. This fact was taken as opportunity by their big competitor, Epic Games, which recently annunced it's openess to the titles utilizing blockchain, NFTs and crypto in general. Epic will launch dedicated program for publishing those titles, making sure that they comply with all the financial and regulatory laws.

Electronic Arts

In November, EA representatives told investors, that collectible NFTs are "an important part of the future of our industry". Chief executive Andrew Wilson told that he believes FIFA players want to see NFTs in the franchise. EA see main utility of collectible NFTs representing various in-game assests like player cards, customizables etc.

Well, looking how popular sport games published by EA are, it could be major breakthrough if they would put decision to implenent NFTs for their titles.

Take-Two

CEO of Take-Two, Strauss Zelnick, shared during chat his opinion about NFTs:

If you believe in collectible physical goods, I don't know why you wouldn't believe in collectible digital goods.

Although he is little afraid of current hype and speculation around NFTs, in general, using NFTs in gaming seems to be very interesting idea for him.

Conclusion

Probably, there are much more gaming corporates heavily interested in getting engaged with blockchain gaming, however those are the ones which I found in November press releases. I think that's very good information that play to earn concept and NFT gaming are breaking into mainstream. Bigger adoption and awareness means more interesting projects, more potential gamers for existing blockchain games and more investments into the technology and projects itself. I hope that within next few years, we will face a golden era for entire blockchain gaming indsutry and play-to-earn will become some kind of standard in the gaming industry.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned. Until next time!