By Gaurav Sangwani
Content Strategist for Host.games, Bengaluru
Video Games are more than just a game. It’s a lifestyle for some, a challenge for some, a business for a few or all of it for others. While the pros fight for titles, and the prize money that goes with it, millions of others are buying, selling and organising. We may not realise but humanity has come a long way, to a point where even non-tangible objects have a value. Moreover, virtual objects can facilitate large sums.
Many games like Clash Royale and Fortnite, are built on top of paid transactions for characters, upgrades, items and in-game currencies. Though it’s not yet clear how these in-game purchases interact. What should players buy? How should they facilitate trading? Who dictates the pricing or what should dictate pricing? The answers vary from game to game, sowing the seed of distrust and utmost confusion. What players need is consistency, transparency, security and ownership. They’re not getting any of it.
Blockchain is the answer. Users are often lured by the promise of ownership, but the system of getting more than what they bargained for makes it more fascinating.
Moreover, the speculation that blockchain will erase the gaming industry is absurd because the reality is blockchain is just disrupting the gaming ecosystem for good.
Here’s how :
Decentralised Apps
Blockchain is bridging the space between gamers and game developers. For instance, Unity Protocol – a protocol above Ethereum, enables any developer to create games without any hassle. It has a devoted ecosystem that enables transferring of game assets, wallets for the game/s, managing private keys and much more. Moreover, the platform will allow users to make in-app purchases directly from their crypto wallets.
Liberating Developers
Games defy location barriers and blockchain will just amplify the outlook of the industry. It will bring global sharing, P2P transactions and many other things on-board. This will generate a group of game developers where anyone would be able to work for anyone, literally.
Virtual Assets
Developers can enable a continuous and parallel gaming ecosystem where developers would be able to create their own characters and multiple assets in different games, all at once. The players on the other hand can buy those assets using crypto – increasing the value of cryptocurrencies advertently.
Trading of Virtual items
As we know, Blockchain has a rep of being highly secure and that blockchain ledgers help store data – in this case in-game items and other assets. Developers can create decentralised webpages to extract the data from the blockchain, defining the rarity of objects. Plus, it’ll make it easy for gamers to trade without the interference of any external market. Users either trade on blockchain or don’t trade at all – theorem.
Shutting down the game
Blockchain is – ignore the pun – a game changer. The impact of it is so hard to relate that it becomes difficult to imagine the consequences of it. Maybe, it’s creating what we always imagined virtual worlds to be, like in sci-fi movies and novels. Worlds, not games, with a new entity – its own laws, currency and societies that exist virtually, but have an impact on the reality. This would definitely lead to shared social games that would keep on evolving as long there’s space for more players to enter and which just can’t be shut down even if the developer wants it.
I Feel…
The gaming industry is going through some serious transformation. Blockchain is just making sure that developers, owners and gamers will come to a single platform with hardware getting smaller and software getting more sophisticated.
Whatever might be the future of crypto games, it’s sure to go in directions we wouldn’t expect. Just like the internet, blockchain is evolutionary because the points in its design enable great level of flexibility. The authorities are struggling to keep up with cryptocurrencies, narrow focus on cyptos is compromising the scope of development. Not everyone’s interested in dealing with playing markets. Trading animated cats, is something that we all understand. Do we?
