Not Everyone Wants NFTs to Be the Future of Gaming

It’s hard to walk through your door without tripping over a new blockchain-based platform, and gaming is no exception. Game publisher Ubisoft has pounced on the trend with Quartz, a platform meant to facilitate NFTs in the company’s games, while startups like Forte and Mythical have burst onto the scene with funding in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Numbers like that suggest enthusiasm, but the response from gamers has been mixed, to say the least. To find out why, I spoke with Tim Morten, the CEO and cofounder of Frost Giant Studios. Morten was previously production director for Blizzard’s StarCraft II, where he oversaw the game’s transition to free-to-play and the release of Legacy of the Void, the game’s final expansion.

Morten is not entirely dismissive of blockchain’s future in gaming—but he thinks there could be a few problems.

The buzz surrounding blockchain games was boosted by the rise of “play-to-earn" titles like Axie Infinity. Like the popular Pokémon franchise, Axie lets players collect, trade, breed, and battle cute digital creatures. Players earn cryptocurrency by trading creatures or an item—“Smooth Love Potion”—required to breed new Axie. For a time, players were able to earn more than some countries' minimum wage, though that changed as the value of the game’s cryptocurrency tumbled.

Morten is uneasy about play-to-earn even when it might allow some players to earn a meaningful wage. “I’m not interested in building games to be a grind for someone in a third-world country to make a living,” he said in a video interview. “That sounds kind of dystopian to me, to have an economy where people who are struggling to make a living are playing a game just to get by.”

Play-to-earn also raises tough questions about a game’s economy. Balancing a virtual economy is difficult enough without tying it to a cryptocurrency that has volatile real-world value. “Maybe someone comes up with a way to make a great game that also throws off money for players, but I think that begs the question of where the money comes from,” says Morten.

So far, the answer to that question is usually the players. Most blockchain-based games ask players to buy in with the purchase of a creature or item, and the developer typically takes a small cut from each transaction.