Some dates have a way of passing into history as a point at which the world changed. Sometimes it’s obvious – 9/11 being an obvious example. Other times, it’s only clear with hindsight. The launch of bitcoin on 3 January 2009 may be one of those. Will 7 December 2016?
On 7 December, many months of work will come to fruition as gamecredits is integrated in Fragoria, Datcroft’s most successful title – an MMO with around 8 million registered accounts. Whilst this is a huge development, it would be wrong to see it as the culmination of the work. Really, it’s little more than a first step.
In the short-term, it seems pretty clear what ought to happen (which is no guarantee of what will happen, since the market is great at confounding expectations – still, common sense and experience suggest an obvious path). A liquidity injection for the currency as new users buy it to pay for in-game features, pulling it off the market and adding velocity to the whole gamecredits system, is a reasonable set of assumptions. Rising prices attract the interest of crypto speculators, who have so far almost completely ignored GAME. Volatility ensues before the market matures and the FOMO calms. With any luck, there won’t be any crazy spikes and crashes, but more sustainable growth; gamecredits has so far managed to avoid hype, which is one of the reasons it’s been able to survive and grow so healthily.
More than the market
But to focus on this market alone is to miss the big picture. Fragoria is the very beginning, and even the rest of Datcroft’s list of titles are still only phase one. The plan is to roll gamecredits out as a kind of white-label solution to the whole of the gaming industry, allowing developers and companies to access the benefits of a stable, secure, proven solution for moving value frictionlessly around the in-game economy.
Even that’s not the end of it, because money has a way of finding its way to the places it’s needed most. Just take a look at bitcoin, which found a niche as a way to buy illegal goods online, just because it was better suited to the purpose than anything else around at the time.
Realistically, if gamecredits achieves as little as a few hundred thousand active users, it will already have a greater network effect than most other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. (Bitcoin shows around 200,000 transactions per day, indicating far fewer active daily users.) Gamers won’t have to take any extra effort to acquire it – it will just be there in their wallets as a tool for buying upgrades and other facilities. So it will naturally end up being used for other purposes. Why wouldn’t it? It’s a form of value and it’s easily transferred to other people, particularly those gamers who already have a wallet.
It’s not hard to imagine a secondary economy growing up around GAME, with gamers using it as a currency within their own businesses, hobbies and personal interactions. E-commerce, loans, tips, gaming conventions… and that’s just the start. If a critical mass is achieved then there’s no reason to assume it will be confined to use by gamers and within the broader gaming world. Gamecredits would be ‘backed’ by revenues from the gaming industry, rendering it less volatile and a better store of value than bitcoin.
All of this is speculative, of course, but it’s interesting that blockchain offers the ability to do properly something that has never worked very well: private currencies. These are issued outside of formal structures of banking and governments, but have generally been hampered in their adoption in one way or another – either because the (single) issuer is untrustworthy or cannot honour their commitment to back the currency, or because they are constrained by their geographic limitations (in the case of local currencies, for example). Gamecredits has neither problem, which makes it not just attractive but potentially revolutionary – within the gaming industry and more widely.
Some of the team behind GameCredits
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