International NFT Day
How NFTs Revolutionized Our Business
September 20th, 2022
Devin Passage - Senior Blockchain Engineer
When I first heard about NFTs, it was the NFT art explosion at the beginning of 2021.
“Wow, a way for online, digital artists to actually get paid” was literally my first thought. I never dreamed, though, what it would mean for my future and the future of my industry.
I had known about cryptocurrencies and defi, but I had not learned about smart contracts, world computers, or what Ethereum and similar blockchains were capable of. As a mobile game developer, my main focus was a game I had just released. That summer, as the release faded, I began pitching games to my publisher and we started working on several new mobile game projects.
However, in the midst of these pitches, we saw a new opportunity on the horizon that seemed too good to miss:
Games using NFTs. We started talking about it in September 2021.
What is an NFT? A Non Fungible Token is a digital asset that lives on the blockchain, controlled by a program called a Smart Contract. NFTs are unique, in that no individual one is exactly equivalent to another. NFTs are not required to be unique in any way other than their id code, but most NFTs are differentiated from one another by a set of randomly determined, or intentionally designed, unique differences.
At first, we balked- aren’t these hyper speculative investments? But the technologist in me was a voice of reason. Technology is just a tool. What you choose to do with it, is what matters. Rather than seeing it as a potential get-rich-quick scheme, I saw NFTs as a way to allow players to truly own their game pieces. Just like how players own their game pieces in two of my favorite games: Magic the Gathering, and Warhammer 40,000.
I had known since I learned about it that crypto was a technology looking for a problem to solve. And I realized the problem it could solve was games.
Rather than being stuck in a monolithic game server somewhere, totally under the control of the developer, NFTs allow players items to be stored on the blockchain. The blockchain is an open database available to all, where users can trade their holdings for real money outside of the purview of the developer.
After a few weeks of deliberation and consultation, we decided. Despite some risk, this new technology granted us a new opportunity. We took it, and founded Crypthulhu Studios at the end of 2021. Our mission was to utilize NFTs to allow players to experience new kinds of games, games that they truly owned a part of.
Now, in September 2022, almost exactly one year after we began spitballing ideas, our first game is out. Called Dimension-X, it is an idle superhero management game where players collect and deploy teams of superheroes to earn currency to improve their heroes and expand their teams. It applies our years of collective experience developing games with a sense of immediate fun and excitement to NFT gaming and I think it does it with a pizzaz and flair that nobody has yet seen in the space.
Already, we are adapting as game developers to what we are seeing in our new game. Players are now adding a whole new dimension to their gameplay: one of purchasing and selling game pieces, in addition to playing with them, in an innovation we haven’t seen since the early 90s with the advent of Magic the Gathering.
We are so thankful to the NFT and crypto community that has accepted us and made our first game a success- it is amazing to look back on that choice and realize we made the right one.
I can’t wait to see how NFTs, a humble invention made possible by the blockchain, continue to change and shape the landscape of gaming. What are you excited to see in the NFT space as it relates to gaming?