Altura NFT: Reinventing the Gaming Experience With Blockchain
Altura NFT is developing a smart contract platform to change how game developers and players think of in-game assets, an approach that could result in gaming never being the same.
The gaming industry has seen exponential growth over the past years, with Accenture estimating its total value over the $300 billion mark. With more than 500 million people having joined the gaming world over the past three years, investors are looking to fund startups and companies that are reinventing the industry.
Seth Schuler, managing director with Accenture’s Software & Platforms industry group, referred to the growing dominance of gaming in the entertainment industry by stating:
“The emergence of new gaming platforms and changing demographics are pushing gaming businesses away from being product-centric to becoming experience-oriented platforms. The industry must balance the needs of its newest adopters, who care more deeply about their online interactions, with the expectations of gaming loyalists who remain the industry’s most lucrative customers.”
Not only is the gaming community continuing to grow but the needs of its members are also changing. While gaming used to be all about entertainment in the past, they now have a financial aspect to them that has resulted in niches like Esports and Streaming industries exploding in popularity.
Gaming Is Now Serious Business
These financial considerations have prompted gamers to be more passionate than ever about their virtual experiences, which means companies can no longer ignore their demands. Game developers like EA Games have found this out the hard way, with the company experiencing massive backlash from gamers all around the globe back in 2017 due to its use of loot boxes. The result of the controversy was that the giant was forced to suspend in-game purchases.
The backlash experienced by EA games is not an isolated case. Gamers all around the world have criticized the increasing use of loot boxes and in-game transactions in their favorite games. While video games have always had an element of randomness to them, requiring players to pay for an element that relies entirely on it has proved to be an unpopular approach.
This is especially troublesome when considering that gamers who acquire in-game assets directly or via loot boxes don’t really own the assets. The fact that developers can modify the assets, ban players, or have the game no longer be supported, means that players are “renting” the assets more than actually buying or earning them.
Intrinsic Value Through Blockchain Technology
Altura NFT is aiming to change this reality by providing players with real ownership over their in-game assets. By allowing developers to easily mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the startup believes it can change how users and developers interact, resulting in digital items gaining intrinsic value. The platform’s white reads:
“Altura wants to provide easy-to-use solutions for minting NFTs – Nonfungible tokens – to represent in-game items. We also want to provide Smart NFTs; NFTs with dynamic properties that can be changed based on time-based conditions, function-call-based conditions, or real-world conditions offer a new world of potential NFTs. This is an idea that has yet to be effectively implemented in an easy-to use manner.”
Built as an open-source project with simple APIs, Altura NFT is creating a protocol with a high degree of transparency that allows the creation of NFTs with a high degree of granularity. For example, developers could set a transaction tax that holders will incur every time the NFT’s ownership changes, creating a new source of revenue.
Closing Black Markets for Good
Historically, game developers have shown a hostile stand toward practices like Real Money Trading (RMT) as they provide hackers and players with reasons to act maliciously. However, this stance has led to the creation of black markets and account selling. Altura NFT’s approach removes the need for such markets by providing developers with the transparency that blockchain technology provides.
The result is an ecosystem in which developers and players share control over the assets: Developers control how the asset is used in its games while players can easily transact with them, profiting from their gaming efforts. When it comes to loot boxes, players no longer will need to trust the developer when it comes to the randomness of their algorithm, Altura NFT takes care of that.
With gaming companies and startups having received more than $5.9 billion in funding during the first 7 months of 2021, the interest shown by venture capitalists in gaming couldn’t be clearer. It is also noteworthy that most of these investments have made it to companies looking to change the infrastructure and ancillary services of the gaming industries, instead of being focused on game development.
Altura NFT certainly has benefited from this increased interest from investors, with its ALU cryptocurrency seeing its value increase by over 500% in less than a month. The time seems right for those looking to change gaming forever, with the startup planning to take advantage of the momentum the industry is experiencing.
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