Disrupting the Game Industry — Games as microjobbing opportunities
We are developing City States: Medieval, a multiplayer strategy game with cross platform support to introduce millions of players to blockchain tech in a non intrusive way. Follow on twitter, reddit and join us on discord!
In our previous article, we made the statement that games will drive the global crypto revolution in 10 years or less. In this issue, we want to outline how and why this will happen in accelerating speed over the next few years.
A lot of gamers already earn money doing what they love — playing games. I’m not talking about the few professional players that compete in leagues and tournaments against each other but ordinary people like you and me. From farming Gold in WoW, reselling skins in CS:GO or creating content in Second Life, gamers will find ways to turn their hobby into a profit if given the opportunity.
In most games it’s against the Terms of Service to sell in-game currency or try to make a profit in general. Others encourage it to strengthen their userbase and retention rate of active players. The problem with all of these games is that they can be rigged in favor of the game studio to maximize their profits because there is no public record to check.
Obviously, we wouldn’t utilize blockchain in our game if we didn’t think that blockchain is the solution to this. A public record of all transactions will prevent or at least make it known when a game studio creates items or resources out of thin air to the disadvantage of the games economy.
If there are two comparable games and one is known to increase their revenue on behalf of the games economy while the other is known to optimize it to maximize the users earnings potential — which game is going to win in the long run?
There is reason for Linden Lab the studio behind Second Life why they haven’t published any earning reports for a decade. Back then their revenue was already ~$100 million per year with a game-economy of ~$460 million. It was estimated that players made roughly as much playing the game as Linden Lab itself.
If game studios wouldn’t be as greedy and left more of the revenue pie to those playing their game, the questions are:
- How much would that cause the games economy to grow?
- How much would the in-game currency increase in value?
- How many more players would be incentivized to play the game?
- And finally: could playing games be competitive to minimum wage?
While this may seem like a long stretch today, I’m positive that it will start to happen in the near future. Maybe not by playing one game, but playing several games in short bursts like it’s usually done on mobile already could make a living and even force corporations to raise wages for ordinary jobs.
The last generation can’t imagine a world without smart phones and the one before barely remembers how it was without the internet. There is a new generation growing up now that will take crypto currencies and blockchain integration as a given.
According to a study from 2016, the average gamer spends around half an hour while the primary user groups spend more than 1.5 hours per day only playing games on mobile. American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media. Mobile alone makes up more than 3.5 hours of this. These metric, especially the mobile share are growing year over year.
In City States: Medieval, we are using proven concepts for mobile games (Empire Building, Resource Management, Strategy, Multiplayer) that can attract millions to ten millions of players if executed right. Unlike these old school Pay-2-Win games, we offer an open global market where all resources and in-game items can be traded among players.
We want to build our games economy on trust and for trust, we need transparency. Every player has an account on Stellar. Every resource is issued as an asset and all trades, orders and transactions are visible on the Stellar Networks public ledger. The price for resources and other in-game items will be dictated by actual demand and supply, not arbitrarily made up by the game studio or an algorithm.
To trade resources, we provide the player with a custom interface to the integrated Stellar DEX to ensure that everyone has access to the same markets.
While a lot of balancing and testing will be required to get it right, we are confident that our model will be welcomed by the crypto as well as the gaming community.
The motto we follow to grow the game, its economy and the players earning potential is simple:
Don’t be greedy!
