Will Games Lead the Crypto Revolution? Part1

There has been a lot of talk in the Blockchain circles about the “killer app”.

The application that will bring mass adoption to the Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencies.

Many argue that this application will be a game. And this was the topic in this discussion panel in the recent Blockchow Europe Event that was held in Berlin and I attended it. Even the theme of the whole event was gamified.

The participants from left to right were:

Rachel Wolfson : Journalist and moderator of the panel

Manon Burgel : Chief Operating Officer at B2Expand, created 1st French cross gaming ecosystem on Blockchain

Willy Wong: Augment & Virtual Reality Expert, Co-Founder of DATAVLT & Kaiju Den VR Game Studio

Benny Giang: Product Manager at Axiom Zen

Jared Psigoda: CEO of BitGuild, Forbes China “30 under 30”and Founder of Livestar

Michal Géci: Head Of Innovation at DECENT, Managing Director at Slovak Research & Development

There are a lot interesting points made in this discussion that show connection between gamers and users of Blockchain Technology. In fact, many of the early Blockchain adopters come from the gaming industry. For example, the exchange Krakken was born in Diablo Auction rooms. And I always wondered where it got that funny name. Mystery solved.

Gamers are accustomed to cryptos, because they used tokens in their games. Some tokens had great value, like the Linden Dollar of Second Life, so it is easy for a virtual or digital currency to be introduced in a game.

Studios seem to be interested in developing coins. ICOs could be an option to fund games and there are more ways to raise funds, like the Initial Item Offering, where some (rare) items are offered in exchange for funding.. This way players can be investors in their favorite games or developers.

On the other end of the spectrum gamers can safely keep their items in the Blockchain and trade them, without the fear of being banned by the game for whatever reason and thus lose everything. And they can trade whatever items they want. Items necessary for completing the game or vanity items ( like skins ) that are so popular in free to play games. Everything will be tokenized.

There are a lot more ideas about the future. But let’s do a reality check in the present. Blockchain games is a very small niche, with most known game to be the Cryptokitties. And we all remember what happened with this one. It congested the Ethereum Blockchain in a point that it was almost unusable. In reality Blockchain as it is now cannot handle big games with a lot of players due to scalability issues. And moreover the whole user experience is not user friendly at all with fees, wallets etc.

Certainly, it will improve, but it is not there by far. And it should improve, because I would agree with the panelists, games is a great way to bring mass adoption. Few years ago Farmville was 50% of Facebook’s traffic. Many people used Facebook only because of this game.

Which game will it be Blockchain’s Farmville ?

Be Healthy, Smile and Steem On !!!