During an auction that ended Sunday, Illuvium, a future Ethereum-based role-playing game, sold more over $72 million in digital plots dubbed NFTs.

Nearly 20,000 digital plots were finally sold to investors and potential players during the sale, which began on Thursday. Illuvium's black NFTs are powered by Immutable X, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that makes transactions cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient.

In the video game world, NFT is a blockchain token that verifies ownership of a digital asset, such as an artwork or collectible, and can be used to represent land, player avatars and costumes, or weaponry. Illuvium's game environment will eventually feature 100,000 pieces of land, with owners having access to numerous in-game benefits including fuel extraction, which may be sold to other players for a profit. Later this year, Illuvium will be launched for Windows and Mac computers.

The developers will save 29 of the 20,000 plots submitted for future giveaways, with the two most valued additional Tier 5 plots in the game being auctioned off in a conventional auction style. ‍

‍Illuvium used a Dutch auction structure for the 19,969 plots sold, with the price of each plot dropping steadily throughout each lot of land offered for sale. Tier 1 parcels cost 2 ETH (currently $3,700), Tier 2 parcels cost 6 ETH ($11,100), Tier 3 parcels cost 20 ETH ($37,000), and Tier 4 parcels cost 80 ETH ($148,000).

At the time of its release, Illuvium had a gross of more than $72 million. The designers stated in a tweet that 4,018 ETH (about $7.4 million today) will be allocated to individuals who invest the game's ILV token. Meanwhile, 239,388 siLV2 tokens (worth around $22 million) will be burned or permanently destroyed, lowering the game's overall supply.

"Inflation is terrible, deflation is excellent," says a government official who explains the benefits of planned combustion.

For blockchain-based metaverse games like The Sandbox and Decentraland, virtual land sales have earned hundreds of millions of dollars. According to a research by MetaMetric Solutions, virtual land was sold for roughly $501 million in 2021, with another $85 million sold in January 2022 alone.

The land sale by Illuvium isn't quite a record — another Ethereum-based game, Ember Sword, sold for $203 million in July — but it is noteworthy given the current weak market in both NFTs and crypto markets.

Following a record $476 million on May 1, daily trade volumes on the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea were in the $25 million to $40 million range, with top projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club losing value.

‍