Fractal, it is first and foremost a Twitch-like website. This is the latest project launched by Justin Kan, the co-founder of the streaming platform bought back $ 1 billion in 2014.. Two weeks ago, Justin Kan announced the launch of Fractal, a buy / resale platform combining video games and NFTs. English-speaking acronym meaning Non Fungible Token, NFTs bind an object with an address on the blockchain, itself a technology for storing and transmitting information. In summary, each NFT is a digital file to which is attached a certificate of authenticity.. They are all the rage today for investors, who see them as a new way to make money. This is also the case of Justin Kan who connects his project to video games:
I have spent way too much time playing online games to collect gold. NFTs available on a blockchain can bring real new acquisitions to players, with new layers of porgrammation and interoperability in games. It is the future that we are in a hurry to build. – Justin Kan, PR NewsWire
So how does Fractal work? Overall, you just need to play your favorite games (at least, those whose NFTs can be traded on Fractal and which are registered on your marketplace) to get NFTs. For example, after a big session on a game like World of Warcraft, the player will be able to pick up a unique outfit, sword or mount. He can decide to profit from it in game, or to resell it directly. The Fractal platform is presented as a marketplace for NFTs of partner games, which benefit from the promotion of the platform. We can thus discover games using NFTs, verify that they are indeed liquid (easy to buy / resell thanks to the presence of enough buyers and sellers) … And no doubt that the platform will carry out marketing as it is appropriate, taking advantage of the aura and the notoriety of its founder.
If the idea may seem tempting at first glance, it should be remembered that this story between NFT and video game is only in its infancy and that for the moment, nothing is very conclusive. It is for example Ubisoft which tried to launch out in the field with Quartz, a platform similar to Fractal. It allows players to collect NFT items in exchange for their playing time, which they can then resell in secondary markets. Except that this initiative did not please the players : the video generated 30,000 “I don’t like on Youtube“, for 1 100”I like“.
A similar setback for GSC Game World, developers of the highly anticipated survival game 2: Heart of Chernobyl. On December 15, the studio announced the project and “intends to sell pieces of the game to players, including digital items“and the possibility of creating faces from photogrammetric data. A decision which, there too, did not please: two days later, GSC Games decided “cancel everything that was connected to NFTs in STALKER 2“.
Source: PRNewsWire
