Why NFTs?

If I bought a pack of Pokémon cards and Nintendo told me I could play with those cards but not sell them to other people I would never deal with them again. The idea that you can pay money for things in a game, but not be able to sell them to other people for money is broken. Centralised exchanges run by games companies don’t fully address this issue: consider what happened to the Diablo Auction House, people invested hundreds of hours and their hard earned cash building around the auction house only to have Blizzard rip it away.

We use NFTs for the items in our games to benefit ourselves and to benefit the customers. Because customers can sell NFTs after purchase we can charge a higher price for those NFTs. This doesn’t necessarily change how much the customer will spend on a game over time (because they can buy on secondary market), but it does mean our revenue is front loaded, which gives us more opportunity. For customers being able to claim back some of their spend by selling their collections is a huge benefit. Furthermore because the exchange is open and decentralised information about rarity and availability is completely transparent to all players.

We don’t promote the idea that the in-game NFTs can be used to make money, as with any other collectible some savvy traders may make money, but the average player isn’t going to make money.

But aren’t NFTs scams?

The technology has been used for scams, but the same argument can be made about many other technologies: traditional online payments accounted for $48 billion worth of fraud in 2022, and plain old US dollars are THE currency of the black-market.

To address some of the concerns around NFT scams we are very careful about selling NFTs before they have utility. We will launch limited release NFTs for avid supporters of our portal and our game, but these will be short runs (< 1000 NFTs) used to fund portal and game development.

We also make an open source promise: if a game shuts down for any reason then all of the code for the games servers and clients will be released open-source to enable fans of the game to continue to run their own private (or public) servers.

These commitments help ensure players are protected, but they must still take responsibility for their own personal crypto security.