PUBG: Battlegrounds owner Krafton is the latest company to roll the NFT dice.
The South Korean company has sunk $2.5 million into Seoul Auction Blue and $4.1 million into XBYBLUE with the aim of developing non-fungible token projects.
Seoul Auction Blue is an affiliate of Korea’s largest art auctioneer, Seoul Auction. XBYBLUE is a subsidiary of Seoul Auction Blue, and operates a service that can be used to secure and curate the intellectual properties of digital content to produce “limited digital art.”
Krafton subsidiary Bluehole, which develops PUBG, will reportedly lead the collaboration with the aim of creating and selling NFT avatars that can be used “in the metaverse in the future.”
As with most NFT pitches, it all sounds incredibly speculative. Krafton didn’t explain what its theoretical metaverse will look like, when it will actually materialize, or when it will be able to support those NFT avatars.
NFTs and other crypto schemes have begun to permeate the games industry. Major companies including Ubisoft, GameStop, Konami and others have started to explore the space despite fans — and in some cases their own employees — raising concerns about the environmental impact of such initiatives and the potential for fraud.
Other companies, however, have struggled to weather the storm, and earlier this year both EA and Team17 scrapped their own NFT plans after initially waxing lyrical about the prospect of selling insipid digital goods.