A new game is to be launched called ‘Doctor Who: Worlds Apart’. This may be of interest to some and not others, but what is of interest is that it is an officially licensed free-to-play non-fungible token (NFT) card game.
For the initiative, the company Reality Gaming Group, who are a publisher of games and non-fungible token (NFT) digital collectables, partnered with BBC Studios (who own the Doctor Who brand and copyright) to develop and publish the game.
The company has previously worked with the boxer Floyd Mayweather to launch NFT collectibles commemorating his exhibition bout with YouTuber Logan Paul.
A non-fungible token (NFT), as The Verge explains, is a unique digital asset that represents ownership of real-world items like art, video clips, music, and more. One area where there has been uptake is in the area of collectable card games. NFT trading cards are virtual representations of their physical underlying asset.
According to Arry Yu, chair of the Washington Technology Industry Association Cascadia Blockchain Council and managing director of Yellow Umbrella Ventures: “Essentially, NFTs create digital scarcity.”
Reality Gaming Group, who are a publisher of games and non-fungible token (NFT) digital collectables, has migrated to Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution. The objective is to protect its players from Ethereum’s restrictive fees when buying or selling in-game assets.
By opting for Doctor Who, this is in recognition of the television programme’s enduring global popularity. Running since 1963, the programme is able to reinvent itself through the main character – the Doctor – being able to regenerate when killed, injured or becoming excessively old, enabling the lead actor to be replaced (and often with this a change to the programme’s showrunner).
When developing the game, Reality Gaming Group realised that issues with Ethereum’s transaction fees would affect the user experience. The Polygon integration enables players able to trade cards with each other on a dedicated online marketplace for little-to-no fees (what are termed ‘gas’ fees in the collectables lexicon).
The functionality will also allow users to trade assets to be traded across multiple third-party marketplaces, such as OpenSea.
From the environmental perspective, Polygon operate a sustainable protocol and framework to work with blockchain games and collectibles. This includes a commitment to high energy usage, gas fees, and slow speeds. This will be seen as important for many people, since NFTs, in general, have an enormous carbon footprint.
