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Notes -
Exclusivity is what makes luxury goods sell for such a high price, the reputation for high quality, outside of sometimes the very initial push that started the company, is a cope so that one does not have to admit they are that so vain and easily manipulated that they bought a technologically inferior watch (automatics are technologically inferior to quartz watches) at car prices just to keep up with the joneses. Expensive materials and manufacturing techniques are also a cope. If Burberry had kept the exact same quality and sold their products cheaper at prices chavs could now afford, upper-class people would still have turned away from the brand; they were buying because it separated them from people like chavs.
In the digital world, exclusivity is difficult. Digital data is freely copiable. The only way you could get exclusivity of a digital product is through a database; a company would sell you an exclusive digital product and would ensure its exclusivity through control over their database. But that requires that you trust these people when they claim their product will be kept exclusive and that you trust that they will still exist in the future. If you bought an expensive pet or mount in a MMORPG, that lasts until the servers shut down, and if someone makes a server emulator for the game then anyone can have the pet or mount.
NFTs enabled true exclusivity in the digital world; not only is the ownership of an NFT on the ledger not copiable, but you can also guarantee exclusivity through code; the code itself limits issuance, meaning that at no point the issuer can decide to make your NFT mass market and destroy its value. What Yugo Labs and other collectible people figured is that the crypto crowd is ironic enough that they would be willing to purchase exclusivity tethered to something essentially worthless (generated ugly monkey avatars), after it took off they started adding a marketing cope to keep attracting less irony-pilled buyers to drive up prices, that it was actually membership into an club, that it gave you access to unique experiences, etc...
Note that I'm defending monkey pictures here not in the sense that I think they're a good thing, but that they're no more vapid than luxury goods that sell on being purposefully exclusive, they just have less of a fig leaf to hide that vapidness.
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