How can Blockchain revolutionize the video gaming industry?

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Let's face it.

Most of us have been gamers at one point in our life. Video games are more than just a game. They are, at different times for different people, a challenge, a business, a lifestyle, or all the above.

Millions of people are buying, selling, gathering, grouping, chatting, and organizing. While not everyone has realized it, humanity has long passed the point of projecting real value only on tangible objects. Virtual goods can command staggering sums. For instance, just take a look at CryptoKitties, selling virtual cats at over $100,000 a piece.

Many games, like Fortnite and League of Legends, have built themselves on top of paid transactions for characters, items, and currency. However, what remains murky is:

• What should players own?
• How should goods be traded?
• Who should dictate pricing?

The answers depend on the game you play and can vary wildly from one game to the next. Players want consistency, flexibility, transparency, and privacy and they’re not getting it. Blockchain might be the answer – and more. The promise of ownership may be what lures gamers towards it, but they’ll get more than they bargained for.

Transforming the gaming world

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The most obvious way to integrate blockchain technology into gaming is to use the same blockchain-based cryptocurrency to reward in-game achievements, to purchase upgrades and game options, and to purchase other games from the online store. It turns out the blurring the line between game-commerce and real-commerce creates freedom and opportunities for players.

GameCredits were the first to announce technology that integrates cryptocurrency into gaming in these ways. A host of start-up companies have announced their intentions to implement similar features.

But blockchain can do much more. For instance, a blockchain could also be used as a data structure to store gameplay, with each of a player’s moves within the game stored as a transaction in a verifiable ledger. It’s a simple way to document the record-breaking high scores you earn when no one is around — even for tournament play. In a blockchain-structured game, this storage would happen automatically and the historic data would be accessible to anyone who receives a key.

Developers could even use blockchain nodes to store executable elements of the game program, linking to them at run-time to create a more varied, unpredictable gaming experience.

The virtual item economy

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The primary market for virtual items — composed of video gamers purchasing virtual content directly from game publishers — is tens of billions of dollars.

Around 60% of console gamers have purchased virtual items at some point, along with 43% of PC gamers and 33% of smartphone gamers. In the last 12 months, video gamers have spent an average of $133 (console gamers), $96 (PC gamers), and $37 (smartphone gamers) on virtual items.

That’s a big chunk of money going into the virtual item economy. PC gamers in 2015 spent $5.3 billion on downloadable content, while console gamers spent even more, racking up a collective bill of $6.4 billion.

OPSkins runs a global marketplace that serves millions of customers across 95 countries — but even they admit that there are many limitations to the current process of buying and selling digital items.

That is why the founders of OPSkins are creating Worldwide Asset eXchange, the first smart contract based decentralized virtual item marketplace. With WAX, virtual item collectors will be able to trade pain-free with anyone in the world. WAX will give buyers access to more available item inventory and sellers exposure to a larger pool of buyers than any consignment based centralized exchange could ever achieve.

Strangely, it’s decentralization that makes true ownership possible. The database exists independent of any single person or organization, which makes its records objective, fair, and true.

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