For a good while, ‘NFT’ has been just another entry in a long list of threeletter initialisms that was easy to ignore. Like so many technological fads before it, the thinking went, it would surely simply fizzle out. But with millions of dollars of investment in the space, an explosion of players in blockchainpowered games, and now the highprofile involvement of Will Wright, it’s clear that it’s not going away. And that’s despite Valve going so far as to amend Steam’s publishing rules to outright ban any applications that trade in cryptocurrencies or NFTs. The question today is becoming inevitable: what legitimacy, if any, do these technologies have within videogames?

For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token – meaning one that is unique and not interchangeable with a similar equivalent, which has its ownership and transaction history recorded on the blockchain’s ledger. Most commonly, it’s associated with a digital object, with the NFT used to convey ownership of something that is, ultimately, intangible. But importantly, the two things are separate entities. Buying an NFT for a piece of digital art, for example, doesn’t grant you any rights to that work’s intellectual property, nor naturally does it stop any passers-by from saving a copy of the art on their own hard drives. What you’re buying, ultimately, is not the thing itself but a certificate of ownership. Bragging rights. A receipt.

This somewhat shaky concept of digital ownership and artificial scarcity is one of the many reasons NFTs are viewed with scepticism. Another is the number of scams in which the technology has already been involved. Take, for example, Evolved Apes, a project that offered investors the chance to purchase one of 10,000 unique ape characters, promising that they’d be able to play as that character in an eventual fighting game, with cryptocurrency rewards for the victor. Within a week, one of the developers (known only, in a fine piece of foreshadowing, as ‘Evil Ape’) disappeared with the proceeds. That this is far from the only such rug-pull shouldn’t come as a big surprise. This is a gold rush, with a typical gold rush audience.