The Advent of Next-Gen Video Games with a Blockchain Economy: Part I

“What could possibly bring blockchain and cryptocurrency mass adoption?” is the million dollar question that everyone in the cryptosphere is currently trying to answer. To trigger this worldwide organic growth, the solution must tick a couple of conditions:

- It must be straightforward to use;

- It solves an immediate problem or upgrades a product;

- It fosters sustainable scalability;

There are a couple of industries and markets that could greatly benefit from blockchain technology: General Sales, Marketing, Supply Chains and the Videogame Industry, to name a few. This time, let’s take some time to look at video games in a different way, not through and LCD screen, but as a way to foster the blockchain technology.

The Video game Industry is a prime candidate to trigger or at least be a substantial part of another crypto bull run and accelerate the rate of crypto adoption on a global scale. Here I will enumerate a couple of solid reasons and arguments for this multi-billion industry, which in a similar way to the blockchain technology has taken the world by storm.

This disruptive technology could be integrated relatively easy in today’s top-earning titles, however, developing a game from the ground up using blockchain technology is the way to go.

According to Statista, by 2021, the number of active video gamers will have reached a whopping 2.7 billion. Players that are constantly looking for the next hot thing to play either alone or with their friends.

Specialized forecasters have predicted that in 2018, gamers will spend $137.9 billion on the gaming industry and to put things in perspective, that’s roughly 28 billion more than the average November 2018 Bitcoin total market cap. Given these statistics, it’s safe to say that the financial potential of this budding industry is ready for a blockchain upgrade.

Crypto Kitties acted as proof-of-concept which validated that there is a market for game-like applications within the industry, but also fully fledged games as Decimated currently being developed by Fracture Labs.

concept art for DECIMATED by Gary Sanchez

It’s a post-apocalyptic 3rd person multiplayer with a whole inbuilt economy inside. And the sweetest thing is that the currency you earn while playing will be exchangeable in the real world for actual fiat currency, bitcoin or ethereum.

The teaser trailer for DECIMATED, an open world survival game utilizing blockchain which allows gamers to earn cryptocurrency and trade digitally scarce virtual items with others all around the world. The game has an in-game currency called DIO, which is available at a fairly low rate on Exmarkets IEO Launchpad, ZB.com, Panxora.io, Halodex.io, Latoken.com and had more than 40,000 subscribers in March 2019.

These inbuilt economies with ties to the real economy bring the complete blockchain experience to the gaming world, with an inbuilt exchange, player trading and cryptocurrency that can be earned by doing missions in the game.

There’s this new direction where the online gaming and blockchain technologies are converging. And it has an apparent economic benefit tied to it — the millions (or even more) of gamer dollars have been lost or permanently locked away in the form of in-game items that were purchased some time ago and are now forgotten. By implementing in-game coins with a real-life value will give the opportunity to make video game items a commodity.

Games are transcending their natural borders straight into the workspace!

With the gaming industry being so pervasive in our daily lives, employers worldwide are making a conscious effort to implement game-like techniques and gamification processes to make the workplace a more engaged environment. This budding industry is going to grow to approx $12 billion by 2021 according to Statista.

In fact, gamification goes even more profound than the workplace; it could also help find a cure for incurable diseases, map new galaxies and many more. There have been plenty of research studies carried across which distinct findings that the brain operates in a dramatically different manner when it is put in a game-like environment when compared to classical study-like and school environments of silence and artificial concentration.

Having this in mind, it is no wonder that the gaming industry is among the top growing phenomenon on the globe.

Shifting the Game Development Paradigm, an immediate use case

So you have that grand game idea and want to start developing it, find an audience and reap vast amounts of money, great! Time to get some hard facts first. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of ideas and finished games standing in Steam’s queue for publishing, countless sleepless hours lost for indie devs and millions lost in marketing capital.

The reality is that it’s tough to make it as an indie developer in a world dominated by giants like Blizzard or Rockstar Games who have admitted to spending more money on marketing campaigns than on the core development of the game itself. The pricing model has undoubtedly evolved from a “pay upfront” method to “free to play” as gamers worldwide got tired of paying for games that turned out to be disappointing.

Building a solid fan base is the key to long-term success as gamers are a loyal bunch and rarely change games once they’ve invested a couple of hundred hours into their favorites. Blockchain technology promises to upgrade the payment model as well. In exchange for a portion of computing power, developers can create games embedded with programs that could mine cryptocurrency as long as the gamer plays the game.

This way, developers will be incentivized to create engaging experiences to keep gamers glued to their screens. With the recent developments in processing power, this would be possible in such a way that it does not disrupt with the core gaming experience while the developers receive instant payment directly from the gamers bypassing any soul-crushing third-parties that only bump up the price of the final product. In the future, it will not be uncommon for indie games to compete with household names like GTA that are currently dominating the gaming revenue tops.

That would be all for part I, people just don’t have the time for long reads anymore. Stay tuned and I will feature the second part that will delve even more deeply into the potentially synergistic relationship of video games and blockchain.

Stay tuned you technology geeks.