Animoca Brands looks to non-fungible tokens as future of in-game licencing
Animoca has made 100 super value chests available until 15 May 2020.
Gaming company Animoca Brands has conducted an online non-fungible token (NFT) sale related to its mobile game Crazy Defense Heroes.
Crazy Defense Heroes is a popular tower defence and collectable card mobile game with approximately 2 million downloads to date.
In March this year, characters from Black Jack, the Japanese manga written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka, were added to Crazy Defense Heroes to celebrate the game’s two-year anniversary.
Commencing last week and lasting until 15 May, Animoca has made a total of 100 “super value chests” available for purchase with all value chests containing collectable card NFTs, in-game currency (gems) and VIP points.
Players can purchase three different types of value chests – rare, epic and legendary – with each type varying in popularity and thereby, generating further exclusivity.
Notably, the super value chest promotion provides 150% more gems than the standard in-game pricing.
The rationale behind the sale is based on taking Crazy Defense Heroes into the cryptocurrency space.
The super value chests sale marks the first foray of Crazy Defense Heroes – a traditional mobile game – to exploring opportunities provided by blockchain technology, “and represents the first of several planned actions to overcome the divide between the worlds of traditional gaming and cryptographic gaming”, according to Animoca.
The dawn of NFT
NFTs are digital assets and collectables powered by blockchain technology.
The authenticity, scarcity, and other properties of NFTs are independently guaranteed, verified and secured on blockchain, the decentralised ledger technology.
According to Animoca, NFTs can be rare or even unique in a way that other digital assets cannot.
The concept of NFTs means buyers can own digital commodities online regardless of any decisions taken by the game or the NFT’s publisher – a de-facto form of currency that can be exchanged for other NFTs or actual money.
Currently, most games allow access to licenced assets that can be used in-game but not traded.
In traditional games, a publisher grants players certain limited licences to utilise the game and the assets therein, but those licences can be revoked at any time – when development for the game stops or if the franchise is discontinued.
In such cases, gamers realise they do not truly own any of the assets inside traditional games, despite investing significant time and money into game content and progress.
According to Animoca, the adoption of blockchain and NFTs is set to change how licencing operates and will potentially allow gamers to transfer valuable assets between games.
Judging by recent NFT sales, the future for commerciality in gaming is bright. NFTs can be highly valuable digital collector items, similar to physical collectables such as collectable baseball cards.
As a taster of what’s to come, F1 Delta Time, the blockchain game also developed and published by Animoca, sold a one-of-a-kind “1-1-1” digital car NFT collectable for a record price of 415.9 ether (worth approximately US$113,000 at the time of sale) last year.