Blockchain in Gaming

The much-famed distributed ledger system has garnered a lot of attention last year, all thanks to the unprecedented and unimaginable growth spurt the Bitcoin went through. It had become pretty clear during the high times of the Cryptocurrency, how effective the underlying system is to support such a huge economy with complete prospects of scalability.

It is this effectiveness of the decentralised system that has led all the tech conglomerates to consider it for revolutionising their services. Google has been in news for researching the use of Blockchain to improve its cloud services. And companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Alibaba are already in a sort-of competition.  

Much has been talked and heard about Blockchain in a number of tech industries, then how come $100 billion industry of games has remained untouched by it?

In an enlightening post on gaming merchandise and their limited accessibility, Etherbots has unveiled an eye-opening thought about how a prevailing problem in video games industry (which until now was not even considered a problem) can find a solution with Blockchain.

What is the Problem?

When game companies sell their game assets, they are only giving the licence usage of their digital products to the gamers, which, at their whim, they can revoke at any time. Examples of this indisputable propriety include recent trade locks put-in by game development companies like Psyonix and Valve.

So a rare commodity you purchased today for a small fortune may become untradeable for an unknown period of time, and you cannot even do anything about it. And this is just one example of how the oligopoly of games companies is allowing them to retain all the rights and the complete ownership of the assets they apparently sell.  It is all simply because Games industry is one of the most centralised industries in the economy right now. And that is why the solution can only be found through decentralised systems, most effective one among which is Blockchain.

How Can Blockchain change the situations?

As an essentially distributed and public system, Blockchain will, to a greater effect, remove the monopoly of games companies over the game assets. First of all, it will automatically create a second-hand market for the game assets, the absence of which has until now kept users from making financial gains by trading the in-game commodities.

It will also create a heritage-of-sort for all the game assets you buy and sell. The immutable block-chain structure of the network will create the legacy story for the assets. For example, when you buy a weapon, you will know its history. How many players have used it? How many battles has it been in? And how many combats it has won?

The Blockchain network, therefore, if incorporated in the gaming industry will largely benefit all the gamers, both in terms of finances and gaming experiences.