You won’t see the word “blockchain” much in Tokyo Game Show 2025‘s (TGS2025) massive halls, but it’s still there. CoinGeek battled the crowds with a mission to find OrdinalX, an NFT API service running on the BSV network, and asked its developer, Ken Sato, whether he thought blockchain still had a role to play in the industry.
Sato is the CEO of Japan’s YenPoint, which developed OrdinalX. The service lets any developer add a non-fungible token (NFT) and a BSV wallet into their game or Web3 app, without worrying about the technicalities. It’s all still in the beginning stages and still experimental, he said, but once developers see how easy it is, more will want to try it.
Otherwise, TGS2025 is a flashy international corporate spectacle with everything you’d expect from one of the world’s biggest gamer shows. Literal square miles full of digital excitement, explosions, music, hot cosplayers posing for influencers, and live multiplayer deathmatches. The PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) banners on the walkways are the closest you’ll get to gaming’s less-cool side.
It’s hard to imagine blockchain getting much of a foot in this door; in fact, we’d hesitate to even utter the word on the showroom floor, for fear the music would suddenly stop and everyone stared at us like we’d spilled our food on our shirt. It wouldn’t be right.
But blockchain would be great for gamers, right? In-game items can be traded for real money (where that’s allowed) and used across different games and platforms. Like mainstream retail, blockchain hasn’t passed the trial and “meh” phase for some reason.
That’s partly because it’s mostly back-end infrastructure, and partly because the “big-name” blockchains never lived up to their own promises, Sato said. While it has attracted some curiosity in the gaming industry over the years, it has all the usual problems: high transaction costs, network congestion due to inability to scale, and the regulatory stigma of speculative digital asset trading.
OrdinalX: Easy NFT infrastructure for indies and experiments
Tokyo Game Show’s Business Solutions section gets less foot traffic than the main show halls, by Tokyo exhibition standards. The Business Hall still had its fair share of noise, activity, and cosplayers. This section was probably the more interesting part for visitors whose interest lies in gaming generally, rather than specific corporate offerings, big titles, and publishers.
This hall is also where you’ll find the experimental and more cutting-edge exhibits, as well as game innovations from Japan’s universities and technical colleges. There are new forms for controllers and haptic feedback chairs, VR/AR headsets and interfaces, and, of course, novel business solutions.
The BSV Blockchain Japan booth, sponsored by the BSV Association, featured a demonstration of the new OrdinalX service with the game “Crafters Wild.” The game is an open-world adventure/survival game created by local developer “Gandalf,” and will soon be available as a public beta for testing.
Gandalf used OrdinalX to tokenize in-game items as 1Sat Ordinals, which can be bought and sold on Crafters Wild’s marketplace and used instantly in the game (we watched as he used it to add an apple and rifle to his inventory).
“I like BSV, and I wanted to build something that uses BSV, so I built the game,” Gandalf said. “It’s a system that will change the world, I wanted to be the first person to use it like this so I could teach other people how to do it too.”
So how does OrdinalX work? Sato, a BSVA Ambassador for the Japanese market, told us about it.
“OrdinalX is basically an NFT API service, based on the BSV blockchain and 1Sat Ordinals technology. What it does is help you implement NFTs into an app, web page, or into a game easily. It basically does the wallet part. It’s wallet infrastructure.”
He said that any developer can add a BSV and NFT wallet to their games using this API service. They don’t have to build their own blockchain integration, and they don’t even need to understand how blockchain works. It just plugs in.
“It allows you to focus on just developing the game or app, while we’re taking care of the (technical interactions) with the BSV blockchain— we broadcast, make inscriptions, handle the BSV Script. The NFT Server pays the fees, users can just transfer the items without worrying about if they have enough to pay transaction fees too.”
So why does it feel like the gaming industry has forgotten about blockchain? It’s because the technology to do it properly just wasn’t there, Sato said. Everybody from the big companies got into it and tested on networks like Ethereum, or Polygon, or other Layer 2 solutions, but they soon found there’s a very limited amount of data you can put on the blockchain, and it wasn’t enough.
“Even putting just a few kilobytes of data, you have to pay tens of dollars; just moving an NFT costs a lot of money. So why would you use it for a game? How is that technology adding extra value to the games?” He asked.
“BSV finally allows all developers to use the full functionality of NFTs. We haven’t tried this yet. (Developers) should be spending their time finding out how to use these NFTs to make their games better. We just want to help. We’re just the infrastructure side.”
There’s going to be a lot of experimentation from here, he added, but the cost of experimentation is going to be much cheaper with services like OrdinalX. Game publishers would spend millions of dollars developing their own blockchain or Layer 2 solution. You don’t want to create a whole blockchain by yourself to make a game. With OrdinalX, you can have a simple NFT API, and any kind of developer can use it. Anyone can implement NFTs in one day if they want to. He wants game developers to start experimenting with it, and it’ll grow from there.
Sato said he chose 1Sat Ordinals because it’s the most established token protocol within the BSV ecosystem. Since it grew from the Ordinals token protocol on BTC, it enjoys the network effect—it’s more familiar to NFT fans and has more cross-chain potential. It’s better to have everyone developing with a common token protocol rather than several different ones, he said.
There’s also potential for OrdinalX to see use within existing game platforms, whether or not the original developer deployed it or not, Gandalf said, though that would require further experimentation. It would also depend on how much freedom players have to create unique ecosystems within their games, and it could be more of an underground thing. But OrdinalX and 1Sat Ordinals are designed to be versatile, so anything’s possible.
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So, does scalable blockchain have a chance in the world of Big Gaming?
Blockchain is, after all, “plumbing.” That means it’ll probably never be exciting or cool enough for the main showroom floor. Nobody should fret about the technology never finding its place in the gaming world through the main gate, though. Like all other industries, it’s a matter of someone seeing its value and working it into the system, and users discovering that it adds value to their experience.
The good news is, there’s a crossover between gamers and blockchain users in the NFT trading world—many NFT artists also work as creatives in the gaming industry, mainly for independent developers. They’re a lot younger than the executives who run Big Gaming today, and someday they’ll be the ones in charge. Remember how hard the music industry fought all digital file formats, how passionately, and for how long? Today, it’s hard to find someone from Gen Z who could even use a physical content format—CDs are getting rare, records are ancient, and tapes are extinct. All it took was a generational shift to a cohort that understood the innovation. Blockchain, even if you just call it “NFTs,” could just start appearing in games without fanfare.
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Watch | Lloyd Purser: The big opportunity for NFTs is gaming
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Source: https://coingeek.com/tokyo-game-show-2025-blockchain-still-experimental-in-gaming/