Game assets have come a long way from initially representing nothing more than temporary character improvements to now full digital asset rights of precious virtual property representing hundreds of square meters.
“In (…) computer and video games, an item is an object within the game world that can be collected by a player or, occasionally, a non-player character. Items are most often beneficial to the player character.” — Wikipedia
Following on from this quote it can be seen that the term “item” or “game asset” as a simple virtual object has developed into an independently valuable virtual asset that can range from weapons to the game character itself over the last few decades.
The early beginnings.. (Phase 1)
Who doesn’t remember the Super Mushroom from Super Mario? This item causes the character to double in strength and size and had its first appearance as early as 1985 Super Mario Bros. on Super Nintendo — making it one of the first popular items in the history of video games.
Another masterpiece in the history of video games that had a huge focus on game items was The Legend of Zelda which was released in 1986.
This game introduced a huge variation of previously non-existent items such as swords, bows or rings into video games.
Due to the large number of different items, the players were able to master the game in various ways, which made it much more entertaining than being limited to only one strategy to finish the game.
For example, the Boomerang was a powerful item that was popular for its stun effect and its inherent long-distance advantage making it one of the most popular weapons among players.
Characteristics of the first phase of game assets:
- Game assets were mostly reduced to essential game principles such as weapons or power-ups.
- Permanently or temporarily bound to the character and couldn’t be traded independently.
- The idea of character customization did not exist back then either.
Progress (Phase 2)
A lot of things changed over the years, especially in role-playing games (RPGs), where there has been an ever-increasing focus on ITEMS.
From then on, players had to regularly collect in-game items to face the challenges in the game with better items such as armor or weapons like we saw Diablo released in 1996.
Items became more and more complex, they could contain various attributes from poison resistance to mana regeneration — finding the perfect combination of equipment became part of the game and gave it a much more tactical component.
Games introduced different rarity levels for items motivating players to fight enemies for hours just to eventually get a rare item. The feeling of looting an epic item was just wonderful, it made you feel alive inside!
Items were no longer tied to a character but could also exist independently within the game. They could be sold to in-game merchants in exchange for other items such as potions or armor.
Games like World of Warcraft (2004) even had in-game auction houses where players could sell their items across the whole server to other players for the in-game currency gold.
This led to players farming gold as a full-time job in order to sell it for real-life currency, which was strictly forbidden by the game rules.
The game Second Life (2003) even had a real-life marketplace where players could buy and sell in-game items for fiat money.
When Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got released in 2012, it wasn’t the big hit Valve expected it to be. Even one year after it came out it still couldn’t beat its “age-old” — predecessor in terms of popularity.
This only changed with the introduction of the “Arms Deal” update — which gave players the opportunity to obtain rare weapon skins by playing the game and opening them through so-called microtransaction.
This new revenue stream gave Valve the opportunity to offer attractive prize money for winning its tournaments, which increased the popularity of the game even further.
It was even possible for players to buy and sell these rare weapon skins for REAL money on the Steam marketplace.
The addition of skins has been widely recognized as one of the most important developments in CS:GO’s history.
More and more games managed to break the boundaries between reality and game economically.
Characteristics of this second phase
- Collecting game assets has become a core game principle.
- Heavy focus on character customization and optimization.
- Items have become tradable, making it possible for players to earn either in-game currency just by playing the game.
- The increase of game assets opened up many different virtual activities for gamers such as collecting herbs or fishing.
- Game assets added an additional revenue stream for gaming studios through microtransactions (oftentimes to the disadvantage of gamers).
The future of game assets (Phase 3)
There will be a time when every single game asset will be represented by an NFT.
With NFTs, players will be able to use their beloved characters and items in a wide variety of games and do not have to constantly change their online identity or choice of weapons depending on which game they play.
This is already possible in projects like Worldwide Webb or Isotile where users can select their beloved NFT characters as avatars in the game or place NFT artworks they own in their virtual property.
Galaxy Fight Club for example aims to let players from different NFT collections play against each other with their favorite NFT “characters”.
Being able to use your favorite items across many different gaming ecosystems is what really makes the difference compared to former times.
Gamers still react with great irritation to announcements from gaming studios that they will introduce in-game assets in the form of NFTs because they see it as just another form of microtransaction — where in reality those NFTs give players a huge variety of ways to generate income.
After receiving these NFTs (in-game assets), the players decide what they want to do with them, not the gaming studios — they can play, trade, or lend them on any third-party marketplace they want without any permission required from the gaming studio.
This freedom of choice was virtually non-existent in games before and leads to a completely new understanding of true digital rights ownership.
Imagine lending your precious weapon to other players to enjoy and generate passive income!
A large number of players are already making a living playing games such as Axie Infinity or Decentraland where they can earn in-game assets such as characters, weapons, or tokens and sell/lend them for other digital currencies or fiat money.
Characteristics of the third phase
- Complete independence of game assets that are tradable across any third-party marketplace without being limited to a certain game.
- Players will be able to use their game assets in every game they want (true interoperability).
- Immutability of the game assets the players own — if the game shuts down they will still be able to use them in any way they want.
Outlook
This revolution of game assets has been apparent for many decades now.
Players want more freedom to make their own decisions about items, whereas gaming studios need to find ways to generate income in times of free-to-play games and the increasing emergence of play-to-earn games.
Unlike the popular microtransactions, NFTs give players finally the opportunity to sell, lend or do whatever they want with these game assets.
As our NFT Research Campaign has shown, there is an enormous interest among gamers to lend game assets in order to generate passive income and also to rent NFTs to get certain gaming advantages such as swords that boost character power or even to test out a certain game.
With the advancement of digitization and automation, an incredible number of opportunities are created for players to generate revenue completely virtually.
For example, owners of virtual property will be able to generate revenue by lending advertising space on their properties to companies to promote their products in the metaverse.
Games where players are given the opportunity to generate revenue through NFT-based gaming assets, will become more and more common and will leave those who don’t embrace NFTs in the dust.
We are looking forward to this development and offer our expertise to all gaming projects that want to implement our technology to give their players the possibility to rent and lend gaming assets completely risk-free with our collateral-free integrations.
About reNFT
reNFT is a multi-chain NFT rental protocol and platform that can be whitelabel integrated into any project to enable collateral-free in-house renting, lending and scholarship automation!
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