Cryptokitties Prove Blockchain Games Are Set to Succeed

Gamers are natural early adopters. As such, it was inevitable that they would eventually flock to a game that uses a blockchain solution. In this case, it is Cyrptokitties, which is the perfect example of a game that can successfully use the blockchain’s disruptive technology as its backbone. You only have to look at recent news late last year whereby the new Cryptokitties blockchain game crashed the Ethereum network.

Naturally, there were plenty of investors and ICOs demanding a solution to be put in place after Cryptokitties exposed flaws in the Ethereum network’s ability to scale. For the Cryptokitties game, the publicity was welcomed in one respect, but on the other hand, it may have been the reason behind the sudden decline in its popularity shortly after it was launched.

Just how did Cryptokitties become so popular in the first place?

Putting the Ethereum network’s crash aside, the bigger questions were how and why did Cryptokitties become an online blockchain gaming phenomenon?

From ‘out of nowhere reports of making a fortune trading Cryptokitties were hitting the headline with some reporting they made over $100,000 buying and selling Cryptokitties.

This craze is most likely down to the hype that has been injected into the gaming community regarding how the Cryptokitties protocol uses the blockchain to solve the ongoing debate on how ownership of digital assets is managed within the online gaming community.

In traditional online gaming systems publishers that sell digital assets as in-game add-ons have clauses added to the terms and conditions of sale that state the publisher still owns the digital asset despite the fact it has been sold to a buyer.

On the contrary, Cryptokitties took up the popular idea of giving 100% ownership of its digital assets to the buyer. Using the blockchain’s open ledger, gamers purchase their CryptoKitty, which comes with no terms and conditions applied. Ultimately, ownership of the CryptoKitty is entirely in the buyer’s hands.

Unique Cryptokitties creates rare breeds increasing its value

There are no two-of-a-kind Cyrptokitties and players can purchase as many as they like. The game even allows owners to breed their Cryptokitties to create their own unique breed. The idea behind this concept is to develop rare breeds. In turn, scarcity increases the value of these rare Cryptokitties.

This concept is not entirely new to the blockchain. Other games such as Gods Unchained is based on a similar idea also using Ethereum to make trades.

Players trade cards, but instead of each card being unique, there can be more than one on the market. The more of the same card naturally means the less valuable the card is; thus the salable price is reduced. However, there are also rare cards that are high in demand, but hard to obtain. The rarer the card, the higher it’s marketable value.

The fall of Cryptokitties still has a positive outlook

Despite early success, the initial booming demand for Cryptokitties has since died off. In March the game looked set to expand as the developers raised $12 million, but demand and value of each Cryptokitty have since been whittled down.  Whereas the cost was around $40+ for a kitty back then, nowadays a Cryptokitty can be picked up for as low as $5.

Nonetheless, for online gamers, this is a good sign for the future. As with the internet, there are always going to be rocky patches. If there is anything to be learned from successful businesses and gaming companies it is the fact that nearly all of them had to deal with failure. Every failure is a learning curve and helps the next platform learn from the mistakes of its predecessor.

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