If you look at the archive of this blog for almost 20 years, you will find many blog posts about people spending real money on virtual items in MMORPG. For years it was something of a war as developers tried to prevent players from trading virtual goods and players were still trying. Traffic Prevention is why your Raid Sagas are "locked" to the character who captured them. There is strong historical evidence that if players like the game and there are items that improve your character in that game, those players are willing to pay real money for those items.
With blockchain technology, any gaming object can be an impossible NFT token that can be exchanged freely and securely between players using the cryptocurrency used in that blockchain. If the seekers are already running, the game can be customized to redeem for real money.
What about examples of failed NFT games? Well, such a game should answer the question of where all this money comes from. If *everyone* in the game is just playing for money because the game itself is bad, then it can't work. They need players who want to sell virtual goods because they love money, and some players want to buy these goods for their characters. This is where Ubisoft Numbers got it wrong - they were just cosmetics in a game with a 58 rating on Metacritic.
But if you apply the technology to a more popular game and touch all the elements of the NFT game, not just the cosmetic ones, there will be demand and there will be trade. There has been demand and trading from games that have attempted to restrict RMT, so trading will thrive if you remove those restrictions. Of course, seriously, if you buy Uberness Sword from another player instead of Lutbox, it's still Pay2Win. But I privately suspect that hard players will be surprisingly calm by then because they will bring in a lot of money.
Have blockchain games been that bad before? Yes indeed! Is it a feature? No! As someone develops a really good game that allows players to buy virtual items through a blockchain, it can be very popular and affordable. Maybe Square Enix hit something. There will be someone else who makes the first good blockchain game. But the idea is impossible to realize: in virtual worlds there is more internal demand for powerful objects than internal need for images of sad monkeys. Analysts have found that only a very small number of people actually trade NFTs and most of these exchanges are fake "washout contracts" to make NFT more profitable. Virtual items in games won't cost millions, of course, but they may require a larger base.
