with how big a buzzword blockchain has been in the cryptocurrency world it was
probably only a matter of time before video games hopped on the bandwagon and
indeed we are seeing blockchain or play
to earn games starting to surge in popularity but how exactly does a video
game use something like the blockchain
the basic idea is this either the games are free to start playing or you pay
some sort of upfront cost often in crypto to play the game and as you play
you earn in-game assets in the form of non-fungible tokens or nfts in case you
don't know what an nft is it's kind of like crypto in that it's stored on a
blockchain but unlike crypto each nft is
unique so they're often artworks songs
or even memes for gaming though they tend to be in-game items like weapons
cosmetic skins or other collectibles but
hold on a second how exactly is this different from the more familiar system
of earning items in game through play or through microtransactions with regular
or in-game currency well probably the biggest difference is
that because the assets are stored on a public blockchain with ethereum being a
particularly popular one players own the
assets that they earn so if you earn some kind of sweet collectible then
something happens to the game servers or the developers just decide to pull the
plug your item will still exist on the blockchain and it will still have a
value as long as there's demand for it and the
fact that it's on the blockchain could make it easier to move assets between
titles even from different game studios since developers would have to do less
legwork to enable this functionality so imagine for example using a fortnight
skin in call of duty indeed some popular blockchain based
titles like axi infinity already have large followings of people that are
making a profit sometimes a substantial one on items that they have earned in
game making it appealing to folks that want something more than just a better
gameplay experience after plunking down their money thanks to eaton for
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reducing potential risks with the 9px lithium ion ups today one possible
pitfall of blockchain games is that they are still based around the idea of
making transactions after you buy the game so they come with a lot of the same
concerns as traditional microtransaction heavy titles
nfts are already seen by some tech enthusiasts as gimmicky since anything
can be made into an nft and and any nft could easily turn out to
not have any real value then you've got the fact that some
blockchain games bear a lot of similarities to
freemium or pay2win releases where you are still paying real money in order to
get a competitive advantage in fact valve has already banned blockchain
games from the steam store possibly due to concerns around items with real world
value and blockchain games have already made negative headlines after one
developer sold a bunch of nfts ahead of the game's launch to help fund the
operation but then the dev just took the money and ran
however other major names in the video game industry seemed to think that
blockchain technology will be a big part of the future of gaming with ubisoft
looking at incorporating the concept and ea more or less openly embracing it with
their ceo saying collectible digital content will be a meaningful part of the
company's strategy going forward and however you feel about that it's not
super surprising considering that ea has already made colossal amounts of money
off of fifa packs as for the consumer side what remains to be seen is if
blockchain will raise or lower the barriers to entry for gaming while it's
possible that it could make gaming cheaper in some situations since
developers could offload certain tasks onto the blockchain instead of using
their own servers it could also drive up the value of the in-game items or
characters that players need to be competitive i mean it can already run
you over a thousand dollars to buy a decent team in the aforementioned axi
infinity for example but there are other projects out there
that are less paid to win and more about accumulating collectibles such as
supdrive which offers classic arcade style games where the games themselves
are the nfts with each game having unique colors art or difficulty
so hopefully we'll see the blockchain paradigm refined as time goes on in a
way that works for gamers rather than against them
just as long as we don't end up having to pay a thousand bucks for a luke
skywalker nft you know i am your son wait no that's not how it
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