Overcoming the resistance to blockchain games

November 10, 2021 Emerging Markets Industry Updates

Valve stirred the hornet’s nest around blockchain games when it announced a ban on games with nonfungible tokens (NFTs). We discussed the controversy around the new tech and business models of blockchain games in the opening session at our GamesBeat Summit Next event.

Our discussion included Chris LoVerme, CEO of SpacePirate Games, and Witek Radomski, chief technology officer at Enjin, one of the first companies that built an NFT platform. (We invited Valve to participate but got no answer.) Radomski said the company’s goal is to make blockchain easy to use and accessible for game developers and players. Enjin’s Efinity is a cross-chain network built for NFTs, and it has a $100 million fund to support metaverse NFT projects for Efinity on the Polkadot blockchain.

If you don’t know what that is, that’s one of the obstacles to mainstream blockchain games. NFTs, cryptocurrency, and blockchain games have been tough to understand for developers, and consumers often have no clue how to use things like cryptocurrency wallets. NFTs use the transparency and security of the digital ledger of blockchain to authenticate one-of-a-kind digital items, and that makes it easy to create rare collectible items in games and new business models around that rarity.