FTX Gaming: Is FTXs recent move a good thing?

Recent news came out that one of the world’s largest crypto exchange platforms, FTX, will be debuting a new unit that will focus on the venture of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency as a whole into the gaming world. Well, this comes from a Bloomberg report so, for gamers out there who hate these two mixing up together, it’s really likely to happen.

But FTX US president Brett Harrison spoke with The Verge. And through an email, he provided a statement about the company’s latest move which reads as:

“We believe that blockchain technology takes features of games that already exist, such as in-game avatars, skins, and rewards, and makes it possible for players to own, invest, and trade these items outside of the game. But the enjoyability of the game for all players, including those who don’t wish to participate in these kind of economies, should always be the primary objective regardless of whether blockchain tech is involved.”

So as much as how others could see this, it’s the FTX US president himself who has this perspective on NFT and play-t0-earn gaming.

But is this new venture of the company something good?

Is Their Gaming Venture a Good Thing?

Before we dive into this topic, for starters, FTX is a platform where crypto traders can exchange their assets into other assets, or even return them to their original form whenever they see that their value would be better. Of course, there are fees involved in the transactions that take place here so there is no doubt that FTX blew up and now gains as much as $10 million in volume trading per day.

With the continuous rise of NFT and play-to-earn games today such as Axie Infinity, Pegaxy, Bombcrypto, and Thetan Arena to name afew, it is clear that FTX’s move has a lot of potential.

And with potential, I say it’s the potential to really change the gaming industry with these kind of games. FTX first ventured last year into the play-to-earn scene by facilitating and sponsoring an Axie Infinity tournament where some of the best players in the world participated. Called the FTX Galaxie Cup, the event provided a prize pool of 192 AXS or $25,000 in value during that time. This is just for one game, imagine if there are more that they’ll support.

Some people argue that NFTs shouldn’t be invovled with gaming. But play-to-earn games became a side, or for some, a main source of income especially for those whose jobs were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Axie and Pegaxy,s scholarship program, the cheap investment rate for MyDefiPet, these are examples of how play-to-earn gaming became a game-changing instrument here in the Philippines.

So is FTX establihsing a gaming unit good?

Well, we can’t define it as early as now since there are still no concrete plans on how it would work. But the potential? It’s already proven on other games, so it has a huge possibility that this new venture of FTX will also be a successful one.

Everything FTX touches seems to turn to gold, so why not crypto gaming?