Major video game publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix dove into the growing NFT market, but received a significant backlash from gamers. Still, that hasn't stopped another legendary gaming brand from joining the fray, with Konami announcing its own NFT plans today.
Castlevania's NFTs will be launched through the leading OpenSea marketplace, with auctions starting January 12th. Konami will post the nickname of each main auction winner on their official website if they choose to do so. In a separate notice, the editor writes that "it does not guarantee that the value of the NFT will increase after purchase".
This is the first drop in the Konami Memorial NFT series, an “initiative to create art NFTs” that doesn't seem to have been designed just for Castlevania-themed collectibles. Konami is also the publisher behind a number of other successful franchises, including Metal Gear Solid, Contra, Frogger and Pro Evolution Soccer.
However, while Konami still holds the rights to many classic game franchises, it has significantly slowed down in creating new games in recent years. In 2015, Konami CEO Hideki Hayakawa announced that the company would shift its focus to mobile gaming and create fewer games for the large-scale home consoles that helped establish the brand.
An NFT is effectively a receipt that proves ownership of a digital item and can represent images, video files, interactive video game items, and more. Some NFTs can be used in playable games, such as the Axie monster NFTs in the main Ethereum game, Axie Infinity , and can fuel game - to - win models that reward players with cryptographic tokens .
Konami's plans don't seem to be all that ambitious, however. Castlevania NFTs are purely designed as collectible items and do not offer additional usefulness or advertised integration into any video game. They also do not offer buyers any intellectual property or marketing rights, unlike the Bored Ape Yacht Club's crypto-native profile photo collection.
NFTs games
Ubisoft was the first established gaming giant to start playing in the gaming space blockchain nascent, creating a Minecraft-inspired prototype called HashCraft in 2018 before launching smaller NFT experiments and supporting crypto gaming startups ever since.
In December, Ubisoft became the first mainstream game publisher to release NFTs that can be used in an existing video game, with weapons and armor for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint on PC. However, the launch of the Tezos powered items has led to a significant social media impact in the gaming community.
Despite complaints about the usefulness of the items and the perceived environmental impact, Ubisoft finally went ahead with the release, Didier Genevois, the technical director of the publisher's blockchain, said it was a “major change that would take time” to resonate among the players.
However, game developer “STALKER 2” GSC Game World has canceled plans to release playable NFTs within its own game following reaction from franchise fans, while game-centric chat app Discord – also popular with DAOs and crypto communities – similarly halted crypto wallet integration plans after public resistance.
Game publisher Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider) has also signaled plans to release NFT-enabled video games after the first release of a series of NFT stickers in Japan, while the CEO of major publisher Electronic Arts called NFTs “a part important part of the future of our industry. ”
Despite recent adverse reactions from players, advocates of crypto games still believe that NFTs and blockchains will quickly be adopted across the industry.
“Every [game] studio I know – from the biggest and most important company to the smallest – will have a product, if not many, involving blockchain [in 2022],” Sebastien Borget, co-founder and COO of the game of metaverse The Sandbox said, "What this will create is the fastest and most adopted business model transition we've seen."
