How Is Blockchain Technology Changing Gaming?

Crypto currency and blockchain will change the video games industry. Over the past few years, developers have created dozens of games, which are based on blockbuster technology

The "Tokens and Blockchain in Gaming" panel at the Crypto-Investment Summit, which was held in Los Angeles, showed the audience one of the most creative areas of the blockchain - gaming. Crypto currency and blockchain technology have a significant impact on the gaming sector, which is expected to become global with $ 143 billion by 2020. That is why we can say that the gaming industry is one of the fastest growing technical industries in the world. 

In 2017, the Canadian studio AxiomZen released a blockchain game CryptoKitties, in which users try on the role of breeders of virtual cats and simultaneously learn the basics of the use of smart contracts Ethereum. By March, the developers of CryptoKitties attracted investments for $ 12 million and gave birth to a whole bunch of imitators. Their example is perhaps the most notable, but not the only one - the blockchain in games has been used for several years and in 2018, experts believe, will help the industry outrun the cinema market and reach a volume of $ 115 billion. The technology helps to verify ownership of in-game items, cybersport and makes life easier for developers. That's why it's important.

As examples of blockchain in games is the Swiss game Spell of Genesis, a hybrid of the collectible card game and arcade created in April 2017. It was the first one, which really involves the blockchain in both the technological device and the game's plot; Beyond the Void, the first RTS that uses blockchain in its architecture; Augmentors, the first game project with augmented reality on the blockchain, and many others.

More importantly, as in the case with other spheres of activity, the introduction of blockchain already solves a number of fundamental problems of one of the largest industries in the modern world: according to Newzoo, in 2017, 2 billion gamers brought to the players of the market more than $ 100 billion. This is how blockchain changing gaming.

Payments in Cryptocurrency

The most obvious use of blockchain technologies is to allow gamers to buy games and acquire in-game values ​​for crypto-currencies: thus eliminating the need for intermediaries and solving the problem of security and transparency of payments. Blockchain tools protect gamers from fraud, hacker attacks, duplicate payments and other problems. Since all transactions are fixed in the locker, it becomes quite easy to reveal "cheaters" - unscrupulous gamers trying to get hold of the game artifacts of other users.

Back in 2016, Valve, a large gaming platform, added a payment option in bitcoins, having agreed on a partnership with BitPay payment service. In October 2017, the blockchain company GameCredits, which created the game crypto currency GAME, agreed to partner with Unity, the developer of the engine, which employs more than half of all mobile games in the world, including Pokemon Go, Hearthstone and Assasin's Creed Identity.

However, the use of crypto currency as a means of payment opens opportunities for solving a more global problem of the gaming industry.

Possession of Game Objects

According to Bloomberg and Eilers & Krejcik Gaming's analytical reports, only in 2017 the turnover of in-game items in the "black markets" exceeded $ 10 billion. This is because the scope of virtual assets - "gold", items, characters and other valuables - is limited by only one game. In fact, users are wasting a huge amount of money and time to get their in-game items that become useless once the player moves on to another project.

Decentralized technologies solve this problem: since all transactions for the transfer of in-game artifacts are recorded in the blockchain, the gamer really owns his gaming assets - he can sell or change them even outside the project. And in recent years, games have begun to appear in which blockchain technologies are used to secure the rights of gamers to earned in-game values.

Advantages for Game Developers

The use of blockchain will solve the problem of intellectual property protection: digital assets that are stored on the blockchain are protected from copying and theft. Similarly, the technical maintenance of successful gaming projects will go away in the past: there is no need to rent expensive data centers anymore, since in the case of games running on blockchain technologies, each new installation of the game only expands the infrastructure capacity of the project.

But there is a more important advantage: decentralized technologies allow you to directly link players to developers, that is, intermediaries will not be needed.