Is blockchain gaming falling foul of Oscar Wilde’s value proposition?
The price is not always right
We live in interesting times. Even in the context of the games sector, which is always in a state of flux, blockchain gaming brings a level of dynamism beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Yet that doesn’t mean — as was famously said about the movie business — “no-one knows nothing” about blockchain gaming. Just the opposite in fact.
The speed of change means that when it comes to the winners and the losers, there’s plenty of good data about who’s not going to make it. Conversely, it’s probably too early to make assumptions about who is going to be successful, but we can at least make some rationale assumptions about who is not going to fail in the short-term.
For, the wild west days of 2017 when all you need to raise millions of dollars was a website, a whitepaper, and an Ethereum wallet are thankfully long gone.
Very few of those projects have developed satisfactory and even those that were honest attempts to do something novel have discovered no amount of cash is worth the experience of running a company and shipping a product.
Blockchain gaming now
Which brings us to 2018 and what some are already calling “blockchain 3.0”. The labels don’t matter but what is certain is this is the point at which things are getting serious.
With short term cryptocurrency speculators forced out of the game by bearish sentiment, institutional investors and serial entrepreneurs are now re-entering the market. In the context of games, these are often those who’ve succeed in the last great boom — the free-to-play mobile game decade — and are looking to bring their networks and experience into play again.
The result is an explosion in startups ranging from game distribution and item marketplaces to games platform, ecosystem tools including identity, advertising and funding, to a myriad of community plays, particularly focused on esports and influencers.
Of course, there are also a growing band of developers with the ambition to move from the current level browser-style experiences to high-end PC client games and native mobile games that support the blockchain in various ways.
The next step
The biggest challenge for all these companies, however, is building a viable audience.
Appealing to existing crypto enthusiasts is no longer enough but creating accessible experiences to attract blockchain newbies risks over-simplifying wider vision of blockchain games’ potential as well as clashing with existing incumbents such as Apple, Sony and Valve.
For, whether a blockchain game or a service is being developed it must compare favourably to existing non-blockchain competitors while also highlighting the sizzle of true item ownership and immutability that underpins all blockchains.
That’s a tricky balancing act, especially for games, but the sheer potential of the blockchain game sector means it’s certainly possible, if not totally inevitable.
Personally, I believe the companies that get it right in the long term will be those that focus less on the financial value of their tokens and more on the intangible benefits that the blockchain brings, notably community building.
Conversely my fear is too many blockchain game companies will, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, end up knowing “the price of everything but the value of nothing”.
Either way, we’re in for a fascinating couple of years that are likely to shake up the entire games sector for the better.
