Gaming giant Square Enix has revealed in its Q1 earnings report that it will expand nonfungible tokens (NFTs) into more game products as part of its medium-term business strategy in 2022. Square Enix (SE) is a Japanese game developer with $3 billion in assets under management, according to its latest earnings report. The firm owns the Final Fantasy property and sold the Tomb Raider franchise for $300 million on May 3. The report states that the firm piloted NFTs on the Shi-San-Sei Million Arthur game starting in February this year. The success of the pilot program will lead to the …

The concept of the Metaverse has been around since the 1980s, but it has only been in recent years that we’ve seen hundreds of projects popping up on the scene. What we are currently experiencing are gamified worlds with limited integration and engagement abilities. Right now, the Metaverse is still a blank canvas for early adopters to test and entertain the concept. When looking at the future of engagement in the Metaverse and bridging the gaps between the physical and digital worlds, however, we need to push the boundaries and go beyond what is currently seen as a metaverse. Let …

Shiba Inu (SHIB) price dropped by over 10% to $0.00001641 on May 9 amid a broader crypto market decline. This year, SHIB's returns were 50% below zero, one of the worst performances by a top-ranking cryptocurrency in 2022. Last week, luxury fashion brand Gucci named Shiba Inu in the list of tokens it would accept for payments in five of its U.S.-based stores. Nonetheless, the bulls have ignored the major adoption news as SHIB price continues to fall under macro and technical pressures. Shiba Inu triangle breakdown The prospect of Shiba Inu facing more yearly losses increases as it stays …

SpongeBob and Warhammer mobile game scores Polygon partnership Free-to-play mobile games publisher Tilting Point has entered a multi-year partnership with Polygon Studios to launch 10 Web3 games over the next two years. Polygon Studios and Tilting Point plan to help native Web3 game developers scale their games alongside free-to-play developer partners, as well as studios that want to bridge from Web2 to Web3 gaming. The first three titles in the works are interstellar strategy game Astrokings from Korean developer AN games, which Tilting Point acquired earlier this year, virtual slot game The Walking Dead: Casino Slots, based on the AMC …

Solana and Moonbirds came to the rescue of the bearish nonfungible token market in April after a six-week cooldown phase. According to DappRadar’s monthly report, the NFT market recorded a multimonth trading volume high of $6.3 billion in April, surging 23% from March and breaching the $6 billion mark for only the third time in its history. Moonbirds contributed $500 million worth of trading volume, while the Solana blockchain recorded nearly $300 million in NFT trades, with a 91% month-on-month increase. Many new hyped NFT projects also contributed to the growing trading volume, especially Otherdeeds, which generated $760 million within …

This week's Nifty News sees the arrival of Louis Vuitton to the NFT gaming scene, Johnnie Walker's entry into Web3 and Elon Musk's apparent embrace of Bored Ape Yacht Club. Louis Vuitton makes its mark in the NFT gaming scene To commemorate Louis Vuitton’s bicentennial birthday in late 2021, the French luxury brand launched an NFT game called Louis The Game. At the time of publication, the game has been dowloaded more than 2 million times on both Android and iOS devices. Louis The Game follows its protagonist, Vivienne, as she overcomes challenges and acquires candles and other collectibles. NFT …

Axie Infinity turned its game into a billion-dollar economy that helped thousands of players in the Philippines and other low-income countries to weather the fallout from pandemic mitigation measures. The main ingredient for success: strong property rights. Players can take in-game material out of the game and trade on third-party marketplaces like OpenSea. The freedom to set prices and to easily trade unlocked a veritable tsunami of economic activity in and outside of the game. The 30-page report from Cointelegraph Research analyzes the top five titles and what changed since the days of Second Life and is produced in partnership …

Blockchain technology is familiar to cryptocurrency users and national banks, and awareness of it is spreading fast to gamers. Applications in industry, particularly supply chain management, have been appearing as well. Through them, blockchain technology may improve domestic life in unseen ways, such as ensuring high-quality food, responsibly sourced seafood, or preventing the counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals. Nonetheless, the home may be blockchain’s final frontier. Blockchain penetration at the household level is so far quite low, but day-to-day utility was no afterthought for blockchain developers. Christoph Jentzsch, Simon Jentzsch and Stephan Tual, who in 2016 created The DAO — the short-lived …

The Ronin Network and Sky Mavis have vowed to upgrade their smart contracts, offer lucrative bug bounties and ramp up security following the $600 million hack late last month. As Cointelegraph previously reported, the Ethereum sidechain developed for the popular NFT game Axie Infinity was the victim of an exploit for 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC), worth more than $612 million at the time. Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attributed the attack to North Korea-based and state-sponsored hacking group Lazurus, as it fired off a warning to other crypto and blockchain organizations. …

What is the Metaverse? The Metaverse is a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash to describe a future virtual reality-based online world. Some have gone as far as pronouncing Stephenson’s novel a prediction of the future. Before you agree that it’s some mystical peek into the future and invoke the rules of time travel, let’s first investigate what the Metaverse is through the lens of something much more accessible: Minecraft. But, more on this later. Unlike the internet or even virtual reality as we know it today, the Metaverse would be a fully …

Market tracker DappRadar and the Blockchain Game Alliance, or BGA, published the Blockchain Games Report for Q1 2022 on Wednesday. After citing that $720 million was invested into blockchain games and infrastructures in February in a previous report, the latest number for total Q1 investment is $2.5 billion. Venture capitalists and other investors raised $4 billion in 2021. The biggest deals listed in the report include Animoca Brands raising $360 million, bringing its valuation to $5 billion and becoming a leading Web3 brand. Sequoia Capital led a $450 million investment in Polygon (MATIC), while Yuga Labs, the studio behind Bored …

South Korean automobile manufacturer Hyundai announced on Monday that it has partnered with the “Meta Kongz” nonfungible token (NFT) project to create a limited collection of 30 NFTs launching sometime in May 2022. Hyundai also created a new Twitter handle, @Hyundai_NFT, for its NFT-related communications and posted a video showing an animated Meta Kong riding through space in a 1975 Hyundai PONY. Hyundai x Meta Kongz introduces Hyundai Metamobility universe. Check out this aweeeesome creature’s breathtaking adventure with Hyundai PONY.@Hyundai_Global @meta_kongz pic.twitter.com/w0iLPHxe5d — Hyundai_NFT (@Hyundai_NFT) April 17, 2022 Included in the announcement was a teaser for a further “Shooting Star …