For those who may not otherwise be familiar with the NFT landscape, one could be forgiven for disregarding the new Terraria Mutant NFTs on the basis of their aesthetics alone. Pixelated gifs, drawing from the characters of the popular game Terraria, are difficult to make out, while the game itself – released over a decade ago, although with quite a substantial following – remains niche to many.

However, the project, started roughly two months ago by graphic designer albino777, brings an important nexus to the fore: the intersection of NFTs and video games.

While albino777 is certainly not the first to explore this space (Sorare, for one, have established games around their football(er) NFTs), there seems to be plenty of room for expansion. While recent plans to incorporate NFTs into gameplay have gone at least mildly awry, NFTs continue to provide extensive opportunities for the game industry. While there has been significant player pushback on a “play-to-win” model, NFTs not only incorporated into gameplay but sprung up around game culture stand to be both highly influential and lucrative. What’s more, as fandoms surrounding games find new modes of expression and organization through vehicles like Discord, the opportunity to self-generate and distribute fan materials may become a key mode of expressing fandom in the future.

Still, Terraria Mutant NFTs seem ill-prepared to become key players in the jump. Currently priced with a value floor of 0.005 ETH (roughly around $20), there seems to have been little fan adoption, and there are only 173 owners of the tokens to date. In turn, prices on the secondary market appear to be falling – recently, Terraria Mutants have sold for as little as 0.001 ETH.

Of course, Terraria Mutants may be experiencing an issue that is endemic to NFTs built around the Terraria subculture. Indeed, Terraria Punks, a similar NFT collection built around Terraria characters, has also seen limited uptake, with only 19 owners for their over 500 items listed on OpenSea. It may be the case that the issue lies less with the concept and more with the audience; it remains to be seen how comparable subcultures will respond to this kind of tokenization.

Regardless, Terraria Mutants signal an interesting development in both the gaming and NFT worlds; only time will tell if these two communities will happily coexist at their digital intersection.