Humans have always liked games and gambling. Some of the oldest board games are backgammon, Go and Liubo(the last 2 are Chinese). But the oldest board game known to man is a game called ‘Senet’ which was played in ancient Egypt as early as 3100 BC.

When there is gaming there are winners and losers and when you have those there are people betting on the outcome.

And then came the internet.

It started with simple games but the more complicated the more ingenious the in-game economies have become.
So this is less about betting on who wins but more on how to turn online game gold into FIAT currency or vice versa.

freemium games : there are over 22 games that earned over 1 billion dollars in revenue https://www.pocketgamer.biz/feature/66339/mobile-games-billion-dollar-club/
These in app purchases are big business but what if the game would only produce a limited amount of NFT and then trade those on exchanges just taking some fees. That would eliminate the need for adds to a big extent.
online mmorpg : these are different beasts that are closest to Crypto

These have their own internal economies (usually game gold) that allow players to buy and sell items in game.

This has also created a big illegal market of gold miners and sellers for FIAT. Runescape, Guildwars and World of Warcraft players have been selling the game gold for BTC as early as 2012.
https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuelan-gold-farmers-are-selling-runescape-items-for-bitcoin/
There’s Piegp.com, Food4rs, Boglagold, Wowhead, Papusgold, Gran Mercado, and many more exchanges that have set up marketplaces to deal with in-game gold trades. Exchanges like these have existed for years and gamers have been selling virtual MMO items for cryptocurrencies since 2012. This has been done against internal rules from the games themselves but there is not much they can do to stop this "abuse"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming

The solution

Turn their ingame gold into a crypto and as such give it an actual value and legitimacy.

This would allow the players to take ingame currency and items and trade them for other currencies or Fiat as NFT. These might pose some difficulty for the developers of the games but would make their games even more attractive. The promise of NFT options on steem is really interesting but for the moment most of the interest is probably going to ETH tokens.

gold farming is lucrative because it takes advantage of economic inequality and the fact much time is needed to earn in-game currency. Rich players from developed countries, wishing to save many hours of playing time, are willing to pay substantial sums to gold farmers from developing countries.

As stated in the beginning: humans gamble on anything so investing in online game NFT items will be a big market for sure It might also be seen by people outside of the games as something they might use as diversification for their portfolio.

It will be exiting to see the first games make the switch and I am sure that a lot of eyes in the gaming industry will focus on that as I am sure that there are a lot of teams looking into the option of crypto to support their games and their economy.

I know I would have loved to be able to sell in game gold officially for BTC or FIAT back when I was still playing. It would also open up a lot more new jobs so that is a good thing for sure.

I am supporting 4 players with my Steemmonster/Splinterlands accounts and am loving the NFT concept of owning digital cards in a new type of game. I am sure there will be more to follow and like that I have participated in the origins of this new type of playing and investing.
You see, for me there is the possibility to play and invest at the same time now with Splinterlands and Gods Unchained and I am loving it