An NFT game has been published for the first time on the Epic Games Store platform. Why is it important?
Video game distribution service Epic Games Store has published an NFT game called Blankos Block Party, developed by Mythical Games, on its platform for the first time. Prior to that, the project was available in beta on the company’s official website. According to reports, Blankos Block Party has already gained over a million active users worldwide. The appearance of the game in the Epic Games Store is a notable event for gamers, as one of the most popular online games in the world, Fortnite, can be found on this platform. We tell you more about what’s happening.
Blockchain games are gaining popularity
Plans to move to Epic Games Store representatives from Mythical Games have shared in June this year, but then it was not entirely clear whether Blankos Block Party will be published in EGS at all. A trailer of the game is available in the video below.
Blankos Block Party allows players to interact with each other in a colourful online world, with the project itself being inspired by designer and vinyl toy culture. NFTs are used in the game to refer to unique avatar-type items and accessories that can be bought and sold in the in-game marketplace.
Since launch, the game has attracted a number of brands and content creators to produce limited edition unique tokens. These include Burberry, Atari and musician Deadmau5. According to Decrypt’s sources, NFT ownership is not a prerequisite for gameplay, meaning regular gamers can join the game without even buying unique tokens.
Blankos Block Party on the EGS page
As a reminder, the Epic Games Store platform takes a different approach to Web3 gaming than its main competitor, Valve’s Steam trading platform. Last fall, Valve said developers can’t publish games on Steam that use NFT or cryptocurrencies in any way. In response, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted that while Epic Games, the studio that publishes Fortnite, has no plans to use NFT or Web3 technology itself, it will allow other developers to incorporate them into their projects. Here’s the quote.
Epic Games Store will welcome games that use blockchain technology, as long as they follow the relevant requirements, disclose their terms of use and have an age rating of the appropriate group. While Epic does not use cryptocurrency in our games, we welcome innovation in technology and finance.
Epic Games Store statistics for 2021
The version of Blankos Block Party launched on the Epic Games Store is functionally identical to the version available on the game developers' website. Both versions are available in "early access" status, and the full version of the project with additional content will be available on platforms on September 28.
The news about NFT doesn’t end there. New York’s Museum of Modern Art plans to purchase unique tokens with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of paintings by CBS Radio founder William Paley. His collection includes famous works such as Pablo Picasso’s 1919 Guitar on the Table and Francis Bacon’s 1963 Three Sketches for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes. The sale process will involve The William S Paley Foundation, the not-for-profit organisation responsible for Paley’s estate after his death in 1990.
Where NFT tokens are used
According to CryptoSlate, plans to sell part of the collection were shared by museum director Glen Lowry. According to his announcement, The William S Paley Foundation intends to sell 29 of the 81 pieces of the collection from the museum. Recall that after the passing of the CBS founder, the collection was deposited with the New York Museum of Modern Art.
CBS founder William Paley
The organisation and representatives of the museum are already in negotiations with the auction house Sotheby’s for the deal. The exact amount of the auction deal is still difficult to determine, but taking into account the value of the paintings, they could be worth between $70 million and $100 million. In addition to the Picasso and Bacon, among the lots will be works by Renoir, Rodin and Rousseau. The majority of the amount will go to the museum, but Paley Foundation plans to spend some of it on other philanthropic purposes.
“Guitar on the table” by Pablo Picasso
According to Lowry, the museum may use some of the funds to buy the NFT. However, he never said which tokens he planned to purchase. He also did not rule out the possibility of using the funds to launch streamers, hold virtual exhibitions and collaborate with institutions of higher learning to offer online courses. Incidentally, this is not the first time the New York Museum of Modern Art has made announcements featuring unique tokens. In 2021, the museum provided artist Refik Anadolu with metadata of his collection for his NFT and digital art exhibition Unsupervised.
Read also: OpenSea platform representatives revealed what will happen to NFT on Etherium after the network switches to Proof-of-Stake.
After the prolonged collapse of the crypto market, the popularity of NFT has dropped significantly, so there’s a great chance to buy unique tokens much cheaper. For other platforms, however, this period has been tough. For example, Rentable recently announced its own closure due to “lack of a business niche”. Its main ‘feature’ was the ability to sell NFTs on a temporary basis.
Rentable
Withdrawals from Rentable are still available, but the platform’s core rental features have already been shut down. Users have until October 13 to withdraw coins and NFTs themselves. After that, Rentable will automatically send out tokens to its owners. According to the platform’s founder Emiliano Bonassi, Rentable has not been able to fit into the market and has not received the necessary popularity and customer engagement. The platform was launched almost a year ago. It was supposed to be a one-stop shop for NFT lending, which is especially useful if these tokens were used in decentralised protocols.
The very decline in the popularity of NFT can easily be seen in the minimum price of tokens of the most popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club. Back in April it was 152 ETH, but by today that figure has dropped to almost 76 ETH.
Minimum price for NFTs from the Bored Ape Yacht Club series
From a fundamental point of view, however, NFTs are still of interest even to the big brands. Tiffany & Co., for example, collaborated with CryptoPunks to produce unique precious pendants “exclusive to token holders of the collection” that were auctioned along with the NFT under the name NFTiffs. The day before, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian’s investment firm Seven Seven Six also announced that it had led a $54 million funding round for the popular NFT collection Doodles.
Over time, we believe NFT tokens will find new uses. That said, the current progress in popularising this asset category is also good enough. Still, the crypto industry is currently in a bear market, which is always a challenging period to develop.
Look for more interesting topics in our Millionaire Crypto Chat. We’ll talk about other blockchain topics there as well.
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