How Blockchain Tech Will Change The Way We Game – Blocksearch
Numerous cryptocurrency startups and blockchain tech initiatives are working their way into major, global industries and disrupting the markets they are incubated within. Many of these industries present natural synergies with blockchain: banking, e-commerce, and supply chain management, for example. Behind the obvious candidates, there are others that are experimenting with nuanced applications of this emerging tech. Among these, an interesting case is found in video gaming.
In terms of participation, video games are one of the most popular industries in the world. One in three individuals around the globe consider themselves to be gamers. That’s a community roughly 2.5 billion strong. And while gaming has ballooned with the coming of increasingly powerful technology and captivating experiences, the industry is poised to continue its growth. In 2018, the video game industry was worth US$134.9 billion, continuing the trend of double-digit growth with a 10% increase over 2017.
Despite these impressive numbers, satisfaction across the market continues to dwindle. Gaming exploded alongside the mobile gaming market, which popularized the dreaded “freemium” game model, free-to-play with an emphasis on pay-to-win elements. Studios pushing profits are incentivized to maximize “addictiveness” of their games, rather than enjoyment and fun. Similar trends have taken over PC gaming as well, as DLC has become increasingly normalized and early-access cash grabs gaining further prominence.
And even though developers are cranking more dollars out of their games, the market share remains dominated by Triple A studios with deep pockets and massive resources. Some indie developers hit gold, but the majority never see their passions take off. The average solo dev makes barely $10,000 per year, far less than the federal minimum wage in the United States.
So, as it stands, as gaming continues to thrive, Triple A studios rake in more and more profit from an increasingly unhappy gamer community while indie devs are by-and-large unable to scrape by. How can this monopolization of power by the enterprise players be diverted to the majority? Some are beginning to solution lies in blockchain.
Disrupting Games
There are several angles through which blockchain can revolutionize gaming. The most immediate method to disrupt the space is through the tokenization of virtual assets and video game economies as a whole. In late 2017, several projects experimented with the development of games on the Ethereum blockchain that interacted with non-fungible tokens used to represent in-game assets.
However, utilization of cryptocurrency in games dates far earlier than the last quarter of 2017. As early as 2010–2011, developers began integrating Bitcoin as a currency on modified game servers and standalone MMOs. In the years following, projects utilized methods to create tokenized assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. Spells of Genesis, which launched globally on Google Play and the App Store in early 2017, is perhaps the most popular example. Spells of Genesis is an arcade-like Trading Card Game. The cards used to build decks as well as the in-game BitCrystals currency all persist as tokenized assets on Bitcoin with the help of the Counterparty asset layer. Players accumulate cards and currency as they progress through the game, which they can then use to trade with other players or sell for real world profit.
Tokenization of video game assets is an extremely enticing concept for players as it enables complete and liquid ownership. Grey and black “real world” markets in popular online games like Eve Online and World of Warcraft suggest that virtual wealth represents real world values. In niche examples of real world virtual economies, such as Entropia Universe, gameplay has been assigned massive value. Entropia made global headlines in 2010, when a notorious player sold his virtual astroid property for US$635,000.
By enabling an environment through which players can transfer, trade, and sell their items, currencies, and valuables, driven and successful players can be rewarded immensely. Other games have not followed suit with Entropia previously because traditional game environments looking to foster a real world economy require the developers to act as central planners and regulators, a massive burden from a legal and profitability standpoint. Blockchain offloads these costs, as the assets are sovereign and ensured by the chain.
Many games have already began to build out their economies through assets on Ethereum and other blockchains. Even enterprises are getting on-board, Major League Baseball is responsible for the MLB Champions crypto-collectible game on Ethereum.
The Next Step Forward
The digitalization and securing of virtual assets on blockchain is a valuable proposition for the gaming industry, but it only just scratches the surface. Beyond simply tokenizing existing value on the blockchain, game developers can leverage blockchain to create their own provably-fair scarce, intrinsically valuable assets by programming gameplay rules and elements on the network itself.
In February 2014, the first “blockchain game”, Huntercoin, was released to the world. In Huntercoin, a custom blockchain housed a simple virtual MMO where players organized themselves into teams and instructed avatars to attack, defend, and scour the map for blockchain-generated HUC. Every block, a sum of HUC was randomly placed onto the map to be collected by anyone.
Over the years, Huntercoin players collectively earned over US$1 million in real-world profit through what is coined as the pioneer title within the “human mining” genre of gaming. Human mining represents a play-to-earn environment- just by interacting with the game, players generally accrue profit. This addresses earlier criticisms of real-world economy games, which suggest that virtual worlds must be a “zero sum” game (that is, for one player to earn $100 another must lose $100). Since the value is autonomously created on-chain and distributed in exchange for gameplay, the equation shifts from “dollars in equals dollars out” to “effort in equals profit out”. Developers can leverage this to build a new ecosystem that profits them through taxes, tariffs, and so on, alongside the profit of players, rather than through their exploitation.
Into the Future
Human Mining and Play-to-Earn gaming represent the first applications of blockchain to new gaming genres, but several projects are looking to leverage the disruptive tech into gaming environments that push the bounds on the possibilities of online gaming. Decentraland is building out an autonomous, decentralized virtual reality on Ethereum. Enjin Coin is uniting an entire ecosystem of games through a universal asset system to create a gaming “multiverse”. The infamous “Ethereum Clogger” CryptoKitties has seen the realization of a multiverse of their own, appropriately known as the “KittyVerse”.
As blockchain technology continues to mature and more innovators within the gaming and crypto spaces experiment with blockchain applications in video games, this new niche of crypto and blockchain games will gain increasing presence as it disrupts gaming and changes the experience of 2.5 billion gamers and numerous developers forever.
Published at Wed, 07 Aug 2019 16:12:54 +0000
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