Today, Sega announced that it's investing in and partnering with double jump.tokyo, a Japanese company that will start creating and distributing NFT's based on Sega's intellectual property.
"SEGA Co., Ltd. will start selling NFT digital contents utilizing blockchain technology in collaboration with double jump.tokyo Co., Ltd. around the summer of 2021," the company said, adding that NFTs will include art, music, and images from its library of classic games.
At the same time, Sega will start looking into bringing NFTs to its current and upcoming games.
If you're still new to the whole NFT thing, it stands for "Non-Fungible Token." It's a fancy term for a digital file that uses blockchain technology to verify its authenticity. It's a way of imparting real-world value to digital items, which previously had almost none because you could copy and distribute them far and wide.
NFT proponents often describe them as sort of like the digital version of a baseball card; there are only so many of them out there and you can trade them with whoever you like, with each transaction getting recorded on the blockchain. The only problem with this analogy is that NFTs are typically only accessible on a certain platform/website, whereas you can take a trading card with you wherever you want.
The other problem with NFTs is that a trading card doesn't emit global warming-causing greenhouse gases, while NFTs do. NFTs, being all-digital, require electricity to exist, and that electricity usually has a carbon footprint. The Verge recently reported that the average NFT emits as much greenhouse gases as the average EU citizen, although the number can vary widely depending on electrical sources.
We're not even going to get into the speculative bubble that's surrounding NFTs at the moment simply because it's a new and poorly understood technology. We know for sure that NFTs are bad for the environment, and if Sega were following their own mascot's advice for Earth Day, they wouldn't be investing in it at all.