Official ‘Game of Thrones’ NFT Collection: ‘No Creative Vision and Terrible’

When an official Game of Thrones NFT set hits the blockchain, regardless of your opinions on non-fungible tokens, you can at least expect the art to look good. Alas, no.

On Tuesday, Warner Bros.’ blockchain division launched Build Your Realm, a collection of Game of Thrones NFTs that will apparently eventually function as a role-playing digital card game. It was sold in the form of Hero Boxes, each containing a set of cards: one “hero” card, three story cards, and nine resource cards. There were 4,950 hero boxes, each of which sold for $150 (0.11 ether).

Nifty’s, an NFT marketplace that partnered with Warner Bros. for drop, says that resource cards will later be fused together to create equippable weapons and armor for the hero character. That’s all well and good. NFTs with vague promise of future value are exactly what most traders are looking for: an opportunity to speculate/gamble. But some buyers were let down when they opened the Hero Box and saw the artwork inside.

The “hero” avatars are average 3D models of characters based in the northern region of Westeros – a Winterfell champion, a warrior of the Night’s Watch, a crow from beyond the wall. But as you can see in the tweets above, some of the 3D models are below average to say the least.

A recurring problem among Hero avatars are “salad fingers” – fingers that curl awkwardly around the weapon they’re clearly meant to hold. Perhaps more extreme, however, are the resource cards in each pack. Twitter user SpicyTunaRoll discovered that many of these appear to have been taken directly from ShutterStock, a stock photo provider.

The premise of NFTs, which are tokens on a blockchain, is that they allow digital goods to be owned as property. They are to digital goods what a deed is to a piece of land. HBO owner Warner Bros. is the latest company trying to take a bite of the lucrative NFT pie. Fashion brands such as Lacoste and Adidas have introduced their own NFTs, the latter collaborating with them Bored Ape Yacht Clubwhile Nickelodeon, Looney Toons and Final Fantasy is among the entertainment brands that have tried to take advantage of the trend.

Even in the midst of a bear market – both crypto and NFTs are down massively from this time last year – new collections occasionally break through and make serious money. Recently, Donald Trump’s collection of badly photoshopped “digital trading cards” made over $5 million.

“This Game of Thrones NFT collection is just like the last season of the show,” tweeted user Justin Taylor, a former director of marketing at Nike and Activision. “No creative vision and terrible.”

Ouch. Yet as poorly as the collection has been received by some people, in some ways it is already a success. Just under 5,000 Hero Boxes sold out in seven hours, generating nearly $750,000. The Hero Boxes sold on Tuesday are the first of many drops in the Build Your Realm project, with subsequent collections focusing on different regions of Westeros.

Nifty’s and Daz 3D, the company that created the 3D art, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.