Gaming is a huge market, drawing in revenues of over $130 billion every year. There is a huge userbase for the market, which also holds a lot of emotional connection for many users.

However, the market is set to be disrupted by a revolutionary technology. Even though it recently saw a change in the move to digital copies as opposed to physical games, the space is geared to shift towards using a new technology.

The Infrastructure For Games Today

Games today have a simple structure to facilitate connections for online play. This has been optimized to a large extent, allowing players to play in almost real-time settings in a online scenario.

The sector ripe for disruption by blockchain is elsewhere, and is something that most games today have adopted as a model for monetization post the initial sale.

Many games feature virtual items, which are seen by almost worthless by many owing to the fact that they can be easily replicated. Moreover, these games also feature a marketplace where these items can be traded with other players.

There is also the question of many individuals trying to fake their identity or create fake accounts. This has long been a problem for games, with higher-level players creating ‘smurf’ accounts to play with lower-level players.

Even though the system works, there are a lot of factors that can be changed with the power of blockchain. There is also a lot of benefit to be seen from disruption.

How Blockchain Is Set To Change The Space

The primary mentioned use of blockchain in online games is to manage items more efficiently. Indeed, games have a large number and variety of items, from those that can be replicated, such as health pickups, to those that cannot, like unique items.

This creates a unique value proposition and vertical for blockchain to optimize processes. Firstly, in-game items can be tokenized to effectively create them on the blockchain. This is valuable for many reasons.

A rare item can have a digital representation in a game today, but the item itself would be owned by those who owned the game. Only the permission to use the item would be given to the player. The blockchain, on the other hand, allows users to have ownership of the item that they can quantify at any time.

The decentralized nature of the chain allows new items to be created and have value on the chain. Moreover, this also means that there is no centralized party that controls all of the items. Instead, ownership of each item is with the player.

Added to this, the blockchain also has the property of digital scarcity. While, until now, digital scarcity was almost impossible to achieve due to easy copy functionalities, the blockchain brings it through its consensus process.

The Future Of Digital Ownership   

The disruptive potential of the technology was already seen with the meteoric growth of the CryptoKitties dApp on the Ethereum network. The game featured collectible kittens on the blockchain.

The highest selling kitty, known as the ‘Genesis Kitten’ was sold for over $115,000. The reason? It was the first, and the only first, CryptoKitty. There was none like it and there never would be, owing to the special circumstances of its creation.

Such a method of creation for in-game items could bring across a new paradigm in the market. For example, a fabled sword that was brought about by an ancient legend is made available. More than being one-of-a-kind, the story attached to the item makes it more valuable.

Through blockchain, this can also be verified. A duplicate of this item cannot be created, and it will be owned only by the player who found it until a transfer of ownership is recorded on the blockchain.

The introduction of a decentralized exchange on a blockchain can also provide a fair marketplace for anyone wishing to trade items on the chain. Items can be exchanged seamlessly and easily.

Moreover, the traditional idea of game items being restricted to one game can be redefined. For example, a mythical item in a fantasy series can be used across the first and second games in the series. This offers a much higher value to the item while increasing realism.

Industry leaders such as France-based Ubisoft have already begun looking into blockchain to increase the fun factor for games. asd stated

“The tokenisation of assets like in-game items allows players to have true ownership. We can attach metadata to those tokens to be able to handle provenance. It would allow a level of involvement for players that’s very different from what we have now.”

With industry players on the trend, along with general excitement towards disruption, blockchain seems well on its way to disrupt videogames.