The gaming industry is worth over $155 billion and is growing rapidly.
Many people have highly profitable careers live-streaming their exploits on popular video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.
In my lifetime, I witnessed the evolution of video games from stationary consoles and arcade cabinets to realistic 3D environments and eventually the adoption of multiplayer experiences using broadband internet.
As a child, I couldn’t have imagined that people would one day be making six figures by streaming gameplay on popular channels like Twitch.
And now, with the advent of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming, they’ll potentially be making even more money.
P2E allows gamers to generate digital assets like NFTs and crypto tokens by playing video games or interacting with virtual worlds in the metaverse.
Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained are two such projects that exploded in popularity over the last year.
Extremely popular in Asia, Axie Infinity is an online game built around non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Players are able to mint NFTs, which represent their own digital pets called Axies. These pets battle against each other all while earning Ethereum-based tokens that can be cashed out every two weeks.
They also have virtual land that can be purchased. One plot even sold for $2.3 million last year.
Gods Unchained is an online competitive card game that rewards you for playing. And unlike popular games such as Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, Gods allows players to actually own their cards as NFTs.
And since these NFTs are immutable, players who mint them in-game will own them forever, regardless of what happens to the Gods Unchained project in the future.
This ownership of in-game digital assets through tokenization is the future of gaming.
And Gamestop (NYSE: GME) sees this clearly.