The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) debate is raging within the video game industry debate. What are the benefits of NFT technology in gaming? To illustrate the benefits of NFTs in gaming, we will look at New World and its rising challenges.
New World, Amazon's breakout MMORPG is one of the most popular games on Steam. Hundreds of thousands of players log in to play it, despite a few hiccups that have seen it bleed over 500k players in a month.
After its September release, New World fans rushed to its servers only to find them overloaded. They had to wait hours to finally get a taste of Aeternum. New World also had embarrassing bugs and players have accused Amazon of placing an auto-ban system in the game that kept high-level players from its PvP events.
The age-old in-game assets duplication problem
Worse is that New World not only had connectivity challenges but a New World gold duplication problem. A gold duplication exploit has given sleazy players an easy wealth transfer function, duplicating trophies and later selling them for massive amounts of New World Gold.
This bug has adversely affected the game's economy, tanking the average price of these trophies. "We are aware of a possible duplication exploit that has been circulating the forums and social media... We are disabling all forms of wealth transfer between players while we investigate. Any player that has engaged in the use of this exploit will be actioned against," said Amazon of the two exploit events.
The first gold duplication exploits occurred in October. The "gold dupe" players exploited New World's update 1.0.3, sending gold to each other, then logging off. They would then log in to the game and find the gold that they had sent to other players in their inventory.
This news spread like a bush fire, and many other accounts were minting free New World Gold. The second "gold dupe" exploit occurred in mid-November and, once more, Amazon had to temporarily disable all its game's wealth transfer options.
NFTs can halt fraudulent in-game assets duplication
The recurrent economy issues have escalated the player number drop-off challenge, and should they recur, could bring the game to its knees. But what if New World game assets were in NFT form? Nonfungible tokens are a technology that generates digital scarcity.
NFTs store their data on decentralized blockchain networks such as Ethereum. To this end, NFT data is immutable. Players cannot duplicate New World trophies NFTs. They would have to hack formidable blockchain security mechanisms to do so.
The 'gold dupe' exploit would not have occurred were the game's trophies sold as NFTs. Unfortunately, the creation of New World NFTs world gives players genuine ownership of their in-game assets.
This implies that players would own a stake in the New World game's virtual assets revenue. The traditional video game industry makes a killing off the sale of in-game virtual assets and will not concede this profit revenue to players at the drop of the hat.
As punishment for the ‘gold bug' exploit, New World has banned 1200 accounts. These players have lost their in-game asset's value and gaming progress aeternum.
