The Current State of Blockchain-Based Games

Age of Rust, Blankos Block party, Crypto Space Commander, Crypto Wars – being in the crypto sphere for a while, you must have heard about these games.

Yes, these are the most anticipated blockchain games in 2019.

With the emergence of blockchain technology, blockchain games have also started to take off. The collision of these two technologies holds great promise for the growth of both businesses. To see the current landscape of blockchain gaming, let’s first see what are the benefits and hurdles facing its mass adoption. 

What Are The Benefits Of Blockchain Gaming?

Blockchain technology provides various tools for gamers, including decentralized asset exchanges, secure and fast payment networks, verifiable scarcity of virtual objects and collectibles, and the ability for developers to properly monetize their creations.

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Non-fungible assets are the most successful implementation of blockchain technology for gaming.

A common problem that affects gaming is the inability to prove the provenance of specific virtual items, which leads to fraud. Smart contracts let users be confident that they are receiving genuine items since they are tethered to the blockchain.

Another main benefit of cryptocurrencies for gaming is their utility as secure and fast payment networks. This payment benefit is useful for creating native in-game tokens and making seamless transactions on decentralized exchanges.

Further, game developers also face a problem of monetizing game creations properly. Blockchain provides direct creator-to-consumer opportunity, which enables developers to build and distribute their products without the need for expensive intermediaries. This also gives them total control over the digital rights management process.

Besides, developers can monetize games through in-game tokens as part of the design of the game and get automated payments in cryptocurrencies by leveraging smart contracts. As a result, we’ve seen the rise of online marketplace for gamers, where they can buy or sell in-game assets in a simple and secure way. 

With the many benefits of blockchain for the gaming industry, there are still many obstacles that blockchain gaming has to overcome. 

Obstacles facing blockchain gaming

The primary obstacle faced by blockchain and gaming is scalability. The same problem facing the broader industry is inhibiting the sustainability and usefulness of current blockchain-based games.

DappRadar is a great tool for evaluating the activity of decentralized apps built on top of Ethereum and shows a glaringly apparent lack of users for blockchain games and decentralized asset exchanges. It is still in early stages and represents an overall lack of sustainability for blockchain games currently.

Ethereum’s gas costs can also be high during times of network congestion.

Centralized gaming platforms have clear advantages over blockchain-based games right now. But hybrid solutions like Ethereum-based Gods Unchained may provide some insights into how decentralized and centralized models can be combined.   

The Current State of Blockchain-Based Games

You must have already seen a blockchain game such as Cryptokitties, a virtual cat collecting, and breeding game. Etheremor is a similar game and inspired by Pokémon. Besides these relatively simple games, Lordamancer 2 is a multiplayer online role-playing blockchain-based game.

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The technology also works great in turn-based strategy games, where frame-rate and latency are not a factor.

Conclusion

Blockchain gaming is still in the infancy stage, and it will take a while before the technology is mainstream. But the collision of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and gaming is promising. When coupled with eSports and an opportunity for developers to properly monetize and participate in the gaming community, the interaction will assuredly facilitate a new gaming landscape.   

Regardless of the many obstacles and questions like “is bitcoin dead” still prevailing in people’s minds, one thing is sure that blockchain will definitely revolutionize the gaming world.  

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