The NFT market may have cooled significantly, but companies who turned a big profit in the boom times are ploughing those proceeds back into traditional and new media in order to put eyeballs back on their creations.
Why it matters: NFTs aren't just selling pictures to people who like pictures. Owners place huge expectations on creators to keep driving attention to the collection, because that's what makes the value of their digital items appreciate.
State of play: One NFT creator told us that they do it because communities demand it, despite some making efforts to bypass the creator royalties that have, up to this point, served to fund the effort.
What they're saying: Dotta, an executive at Magic Mountain, the creators of the NFT collection Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult, tells Axios via email that NFT owners never stop demanding more from creators. He said via email, "You're expected to:
Context: "Everything in this space drives on attention," Dotta says in an interview.
Zooming in: For the Rune Wizards, the secret sauce is lore. Magic Machine owns the overall collection — the larger IP and the game world. They get to give the big-big picture of their world, but each wizard NFT owner can craft back story and personality for their specific wizard or wizards.
The big picture: If someone makes a TV show about, say, six specific NFT characters from a larger collection (there are 10,000 wizards), most people in the NFT world believe that would drive at least some price appreciation to the whole collection.
Yes, but: Different teams have different approaches. Another big NFT project, Nouns, has a similar aesthetic to the wizards, but it's operating less like a studio and more like a fund.
Of note: He says the one thing taking up far more time than he anticipated was social, just communicating with the Wizards community. He thought that would be something like 20% of his time. It's more like 80%.
The bottom line: "If you think dropping an NFT collection will make you an instant millionaire, it's not really going to. It's more a Faustian bargain," he told us.
