Love them or hate them, nonfungible tokens are making serious headway worldwide. According to a report, sales of the crypto investment assets soared from just $13.7 million in the first six months of 2020 to a whopping $2.5 billion in the first half of last year. With Japanese game companies, in particular, beginning to embrace NFTs, 2022 could be the digital assets¡¯ biggest year yet.
Primarily associated with images and video files, NFTs are data sets in a digital ledger that prove ownership. They¡¯re not exactly new, with the first NFTs being launched in the mid-2010s. However, there is confusion over what NFTs represent, even among investors. They don¡¯t necessary grant ownership or rights to physical pieces of work, most of which can still be freely disseminated online. People have reportedly paid as much as $69 million for a single NFT ¡ª and yet the same image can still be saved on a computer with a simple right click, free of charge. In their simplest form, NFTs are digital receipts and, ultimately, that¡¯s what people are buying, not the work itself.
Still, there seems to be a market for NFTs, and some of Japan¡¯s biggest game companies are eager to cater to it. In a , Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda referred to 2021 as ¡°Year One¡± of NFTs and, without going into specifics, showed support for the technology, writing that he looked forward to when digital goods were ¡°as familiar as dealings in physical goods.¡±
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