Greed Ruined the NFT - And Why Fortnite Can Save It
By Eli Ibanga
During the height of the COVID-19 global pandemic just about everyone had heard of NFTs, and many companies were hard at work trying to find ways to extract value from technology without doing their due diligence. Notable brands found themselves in a race to extract value and profit from this “hot” technology, and in the pursuit of greed they found themselves putting the cart before the horse.
First, let’s tackle the technology. An NFT is essentially a digital receipt. This “receipt” has an unchangeable ledger that can be viewed online (the blockchain), which of course demonstrates proof of ownership (Sharma, 2024). Thus, it makes sense that the perceived value of NFTs is in the exclusivity of owning one. One will always be able to trace NFT transactions back to the blockchain, thus proof of ownership is absolute. When compared to some more traditional sales venues NFT transactions also have less intermediaries (Sharma, 2024). They cannot be imitated or copied – except for when they are.
In popular mockery of the technology, detractors would copy the NFTs using screenshots, then post the image to ridicule the NFT owner. This mockery of course offended many NFT owners, but there was no recourse available to them. The court of public opinion found NFTs to be a stupid idea. Furthermore, our governments have proven themselves slow to enact laws to regulate emerging technologies, especially when that tech is exclusively used on the internet. AI is the most popular boogeyman on this front (West, 2024). Compounding the problem was the fact that a lot of the NFT art (and I use that term very loosely) was stolen from actual artist, or had ridiculous origins (Collier, 2022). Tascha-Labs literally took a picture of a diamond, then destroyed it and minted the photo to the blockchain (Tascha-Labs, 2021). All these actions were taken in an effort to create value for the NFT through artificial scarcity. Although NFTs are digitally unique, they are inherently worthless. Thus, a reason needs to be created to give someone a reason to purchase one. But a picture of a diamond? Ugly monkey gifs? Is that really the best we are capable of? The issue with NFTs, as stated in the beginning of this piece, is that the cart was put before the horse. The ideal use of an NFT is to add value to an already popular service through exclusivity. Tascha’s Destroyed Diamond was…well, destroyed, because owning the NFT was worthless so long as the actual diamond existed. Bored-Ape-Yacht-Clubs monkeys were stupid because they became over-saturated before there was any reason to want to actually be a member of the club. What is crazy about all of this is that there was an ideal use case for NFTs all along – and that is Fortnite. Yes, the free-to-play video game.
Fortnite offers its service free to players on various gaming platforms, thus having maximum accessibility options for users. They generate actual revenue through the selling of in game cosmetics, such as skins, music, and emotes (Ganti, 2020). These cosmetics give no advantage to the purchaser, unlike microtransactions in the majority of other games. They strictly exist to allow the owner to express a more unique personality. Fortnite limits access to these items in two ways. The first, of course, is to charge for these items. The second is by creating artificial scarcity by limiting purchasing availability to these items, meaning if you don’t get it when its available you have no idea when you will be able to get it again. Every time I play Fortnite I am disappointed that I never got the opportunity to get the “Verve” emote myself.
By using stringent rules regarding cheating and account security, Fortnite has successfully created the “meta-verse” that so many other companies have aspired, and failed, to create. Players aren’t even always in the game to earn that elusive Victory Royale. There are social events and brand collaborations, such as one with Shuiesha and Toei Animation, that allowed players to watch episodes of Dragon Ball Super in-game while hanging out with friends (The Fortnite Team, 2022). This of course coincided with a limited release of Dragon Ball themed emotes and skins. So Fortnite offers: (1) an established metaverse with its own draw for users to want to participate, (2) a robust user-base that motivates companies to want to advertise and collaborate on their platform, and (3) purchasable exclusive cosmetics that provide no benefit to players beyond them being able to express their personality in a unique manner. And this formula has been a roaring success. In fact, it’s so successful that there is an “illegal” (against Fortnite terms of service) market for selling Fortnite accounts with rare cosmetics to other players!
In closing, I think it is clear that companies trying to leverage NFTs for new streams of revenue need not give up their aspirations, but refocus them. The aim should be to actually provide something of value to the consumer, not simply to get in front of the pack in the race to make money. Of course, even Epic Games (the developer of Fortnite) is not immune to errors on this front, with it allowing many “crypto-games” of varying quality and repute on its store. And to be fair, this only half-covers the topic as it is difficult to touch on NFTs and the blockchain without delving into cryptocurrencies. But I think we shall save that discussion for a part 2.
References:
Collier, K. (2022, January 10). NFT Art sales are booming. just without some artists’ permission. NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nft-art-sales-are-booming-just-artists-permission-rcna10798
The Fortnite Team. (2022, August 16). Your power is unleashed! Goku powers up fortnite X dragon ball. Fortnite News. https://www.fortnite.com/news/goku-powers-up-fortnite-x-dragon-ball-your-power-is-unleashed
Ganti, A. (2020, September 10). How does fortnite make money?. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-does-fortnite-make-money/
Sharma, R. (2024, June 12). Non-fungible token (NFT): What it means and how it works. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/non-fungible-tokens-nft-5115211
Tascha-Labs. (2021, September). Tascha’s Destroyed Diamond. Retrieved March 19, 2025, from https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x2a9e4045185c8d778b85610ca96d79bd8ecdc720/1.
West, D. M., Wheeler, T., Sorelle Friedler, S. V., MacCarthy, M., & Nicol Turner Lee, T. W. (2024, October 10). The three challenges of AI Regulation. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-three-challenges-of-ai-regulation/