In the world of video games, there are probably no two more controversial issues today than NFTs and loot boxes. Why not combine them and see what happens then? Obviously that’s what they thought Atari, which announced an unusual campaign to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The historic video game company will launch a collection of GFTs, or “giftable NFTs“. Basically, they are non-fungible tokens that the buyer can give to another person. But the really peculiar thing is that will be sold as loot boxes; that is, those who acquire them will not know what they contain until a specific date.
When the day comes, the “packages” will be opened to reveal what NFTs they contain, as explained from Republic Realm, the company in charge of bringing this Atari initiative to life. Although the sale of loot boxes will start next February 1, from today a waiting list was available to obtain a discount, but has already been completed.
As explained by Atari, the GFTs available will be 10. Each of them will be made up of NFTs related to the main milestones of the company in its half century of life in the video game industry. A table has even been released that measures the degree of rarity of each of the loot boxes and places them on three levels: common, rare or epic.
Following these parameters, package number 10 will be the most common of all and will comprise 35% of the collection. For their part, the 01 and 02 will be the rarest – or epic – and, therefore, will be available in very limited quantities. In fact, they represent 0.2 and 0.7% of the available GFTs, respectively.
Atari combines two trends that have already been controversial
It is clear that Atari is taking advantage of a trend that is very popular these days, but that is not without controversy. Eye, the mythical company has been coming for a long time with different initiatives in the world of blockchain; has its own token and presence on platforms like The Sandbox Y Decentraland. However, the idea of combining NFTs with loot boxes does not seem to have any other purpose than exploit some concepts that today are simply on everyone’s lips.
Let’s keep in mind that non-fungible tokens are expanding into endless fields and, despite the reluctance of developer studios, video games are no exception. While the loot boxes They have already been at the center of controversy on several occasions for supposedly promoting gambling.
We’ll see if Atari’s collection of NFTs generates the desired impact. For now, we can say that the company has chosen a very peculiar way to celebrate its 50 years of presence in the entertainment industry.