“If you build it, they will come.”
The road to digitizing a beloved real-world hobby (and its passionate adherents) is a long and winding one. If executed effectively, however, the results can be astonishingly positive for everyone involved.
Since bursting onto the scene way back in 1993 with the emergence of Magic: The Gathering as a lucrative global pop-culture phenomenon, the trading card game industry has managed to grow itself a massive (and passionate) global community. Games like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragonball have since joined Magic: The Gathering atop the TCG charts. Massive tournaments have dolled out millions of dollars in prizes to the world’s top TCG players over the past decade or so, and secondary markets for rare/useful cards are
absolutely booming.
Today, the global trading card game (TCG) market is
estimated to be worth almost $3.5 billion. Spurred on by a global pandemic that saw many increasingly isolated folks looking for new ways to stay entertained, a TCG renaissance of sorts is now in full swing, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The rise to prominence of blockchain technology and the NFT as important new players in the larger global collectibles landscape, however, has added an exciting new wrinkle to the TCG mix. Some of the biggest names in the sports collectibles world have already made massive strides into the NFT arena
— nowhere more so than right here in the Tezos ecosystem. It appears, the trading card game industry is ready to follow suit.