After being rumored for quite some time, the new shooter from Epic Games already has its first trailer. It’s called GRIT , and it’s a shooting game set in the old west . Its graphic style and its mechanics are quite similar to those of the famous Fortnite. However, there is a clear difference between these two titles, and that is that GRIT is going to be the first Epic game to make use of NFTs .
What is GRIT and how is it different from Fortnite?
Epic Games has made a lot of persuasive moves with Fortnite to maximize their revenue. The great contribution of Fortnite to the world of video games was the battle pass , although they also showed that only with aesthetic items, the company could make millions and millions each month thanks to the FOMO phenomenon and other practices to attract sales.
Until now, however, Epic Games had a pending issue: NFTs . Throwing non-fungible tokens into his goose that lays the golden eggs was risking too much. But those at Epic have never concealed their intentions to create video games that make use of this technology. Just a few months ago, the company acquired Bandcamp, a digital asset marketplace, with the intention of transforming it into its own NFT platform.
To a certain extent, GRIT is that experiment that Epic Games would have liked to do with Fortnite . A battle royale shooter developed by Gala Games that is Epic Games’ gateway to Web3. GRIT will be completely free, and will be released for Microsoft Windows. Its main difference from Fortnite is that its users can earn NFT assets , which can be sold to other players or used in video game games.
NFT + Loot Boxes, the dangerous combination
For now, Gala is putting 10,000 NFT avatars up for sale for future GRIT players . Because yes, the skins in this video game will be unique, although they will be procedurally generated – nothing that we have not seen before in the Cryptopunks, for example. The sale will start this week in the Galaverse event. Although we don’t have much information about what the characters will be like and how they can be accessed, the sales system that Gala Games has defined responds perfectly to the definition of ‘loot boxes’.
And here what many video game experts feared is confirmed. Mixing NFTs with loot-boxes — let’s not talk about introducing play-to-earn anymore — can be quite a dangerous formula, especially after seeing the effect that the battle pass and skins have had on the little ones playing Fortnite.
Today, the business model of Fortnite is not only to create attractive skins to generate profit. The battle pass has shown that Epic Games not only wants our money, but also our time. With the pass, we are entitled to claim certain items as long as we play a certain number of hours. The reason? That we do not have the opportunity to see what the competition does, and thus, keep us prisoners of their video game. If we add everything that GRIT proposes to the Fortnite phenomenon , the result can be a time bomb . In any case, the die is cast, and what happens we will see as soon as the launch is made, which is scheduled for the end of this 2022.
