Gaming often goes through cyclical change, and it also often revisits ideas from yesteryear that may seem like they haven’t been fully explored. It’d be unfair to bracket digital collectibles into this category per se. It might also be another unfair categorization that gaming cards are a niche area of the gaming world - but given how the gaming world is now dominated by console gaming and other popular eSports-style tournaments, they have taken a bit of a backseat, at least for now.
To gauge whether or not digital collectibles can follow the blueprint of other gaming ideas, a solid pathway is to examine which areas grew from promising sectors into global, fresh parts of the industry.
We touched on eSports briefly in our introduction, but they’re a great example of successful parts of the gaming world that were once considered a niche. Professional video gaming became such a successful and rapidly growing model that it went from small halls with relatively small prizes to stadiums with eight-figure prize pools.
Bottling up this demand and marketing it to the broader gaming community was a big part of why it became such an international success. Once this demand was realized, it led to a successful splintering off of other niches within eSports, such as betting on the big tournaments.
Betting on eSports captured the same market; it could adapt, and gambling companies were more than happy to target the biggest games, given the sheer volume of audience numbers. League Of Legends has over 140 million players globally, which is why betting on League of Legends at Thunderpick quickly became an avenue that proved to be profitable for gambling providers and betting platforms.
Although betting on digital collectibles probably isn’t a viable market, or if it is, it won’t attract anywhere near the same amount of activity as betting on League Of Legends, that’s not to say that digital collectibles can find a niche that works for them.
Digital collectibles may have fallen behind some classic gaming variations, such as console gaming because they didn’t capitalize on the digital market in the same way. Betting markets were one of the first examples of how a digital platform could emerge successfully and adapt to new technology.
So, by the mid-2000s, console gaming companies were investing millions of dollars into research that would eventually lead to a multi-billion dollar arm of their industry, which led to eSports, online communities, and games being able to generate continued profit rather than just from sales alone.
Grand Theft Auto V is the most profitable game ever made, so Rockstar has taken over a decade to announce a new one. A large portion of this profit has stemmed from their consistent reinvention and selling of online products that can be used in-game.
Unlike GTA, digital collectibles don’t operate within the same scope of potential online value. Although it’s still become big business, and millions of people play and trade digital collectibles online, seeking out statistics and other collectible-based markets, moving into a digital setting has been slightly more challenging.
Non-fungible tokens have emerged as a niche within cryptocurrency, and during the last bull run, they definitely caused their fair share of news. While digital collectibles might appeal to a different audience and not have the same intrinsic value as NFTs, they’re often used for a myriad of reasons, most notably in blockchain gaming. If digital collectibles become a much more significant part of the wider gaming world, you’d think that NFTs will play a significant role.
It wasn’t until the global success of Pokemon Go that showed that some card collectible ideas could match the attention and headlines that card games generated back in the 1990s. The cryptocurrency boom in 2021 brought NFTs into the mainstream. While they might have a different vibe and appeal than digital collectibles, it was still a positive for the industry.
While moving to a digital setting has created a few more teething problems, it’s now finding its feet, which means that it continues to be a niche that those in the gaming industry are keeping an eye on.
Statistics show that digital collectibles are experiencing growing demand, and economists and experts within the gaming industry predict that they’ll continue to grow throughout the rest of this decade.
It’ll be interesting to see how far they can grow and if they can tackle the hurdle that Pokemon Go overcame by monetizing or creating a fresh idea from physical card ownership. Suppose they can break into the mainstream gaming market in the same way. In that case, the possibility for profit is enormous, but whether it will ever grow from a niche into a more significant part of the wider gaming industry is unlikely, at least within the next five years or so.