How Fortnite Could Go Crypto
Intro to Fortnite & Their Success
Unless you’ve been living under an overturned shopping cart you’ve heard of Fortnite — or at least the Battle Royale part. It’s taken the world by storm (pun intended) and seems to be doing pretty well for itself, bringing in a ludicrous $318 million in revenue in May 2018 alone. Dwarfing games like League of Legends and Pokémon GO, Fortnite has obviously done something right.
I think the three key reasons they’ve been so successful are (1) capitalizing on microtransactions, (2) ensuring that players can’t buy anything that changes the way the game works, and (3) creating a community-centric environment where both gamers and spectators can participate via services like Twitch.
Microtransactions have been a large part of video game monetization for quite some time and I think that there are many amazing ways Fortnite could go crypto and utilize blockchain technology. But first I want to quickly discuss how Fortnite currently works, then we will dive into how blockchain could transform Fortnite.
How Fortnite Monetizes
To make purchases in Fortnite, you need to first buy V-Bucks (in-game currency). At the time of writing, one V-Buck is equal to $0.01 USD. V-Bucks can be used to purchase items like outfits, gliders, emotes, and harvesting tools – all purely cosmetic. Epic Games also has released several iterations of the Battle Pass, a package of various cosmetic items all centered on a specific theme. Themes have included medieval, outer space, & superheroes.
Other than that, Fortnite is 100% free. Buying items has no impact on gameplay and doesn’t impact anything mechanics-wise.
How Epic Games Could Harness Blockchain for Fortnite
Now let’s get into the good stuff. 🤩 With microtransactions on the brain, I thought of several ways that Fortnite could switch to a tokenized, blockchain ecosystem and how that would benefit players.
Epic Games Token
Epic Games could decide to launch their own cryptocurrency/token. Let’s call it EpicCoin, for example.
EpicCoin could be listed on exchanges and exchanged for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, XEM, Cache, etc. and vice-versa. V-Bucks could be replaced by EpicCoin and all in-game purchases could be handled on the Epic Games blockchain. All transactions would be verified as they’re immutably written to the blockchain — preventing fraud and saving time and stress for customer support teams that deal with people trying to game the system.
Legitimize Supply & Demand
Games like Fortnite with in-game marketplaces can create a virtually infinite amount of items for players to buy. This creates an artificial “supply” based solely on the items in circulation that have actually been purchased. However, since it’s technically possible for all 125 million worldwide players to buy the item (if they had the money), the supply is artificial. Epic Games fully has the right to alter pricing, change item quantity, or stop selling items at any point, so they have the ability to create artificial supply and demand.
This means that the rare, expensive Leviathan skin you just bought could become a common item or be pulled from the item shop–controlled entirely by the deep magic behind Epic Games.
If Epic Games created and managed digital assets on a blockchain, they could create a finite amount of any given item. This would create a legitimate supply and demand would be controlled by the market — you and me. The people buying skins, emotes, gliders, and more. This means that an item could become valuable because of how often it is used instead of just because Epic Games says it is rare.
Each digital asset purchased would be fully owned by the person who bought it and stored in their account (similar to a cryptocurrency wallet).
3rd Party Marketplace for Buying/Selling Items
With each user owning their items (of a limited supply) there is huge potential for a marketplace where users could post, buy, and sell their Fortnite items in a secure way. Think eBay but peer-to-peer and upon a succesful purchase, the items would be directly deposited into your account for use. Just imagine – you post an item for sale and while you’re playing a small HUD popup notifies you that someone just bought it. Cha-ching!
This would allow for the creation of a user-powered economy and the value of items would initally be set by Epic Games, but validated and regulated by the community.
Imagine you buy an item that with a finite quanity of 100 units. You would have a truly rare item, but at the moment if you wanted to sell it you would have to refund it to Epic Games — yippee…?
What if you could sell it to the highest bidder? Maybe even to Ninja himself! 🤓 Epic Games could additionally monetize this by charging a small transaction fee or even a percentage of the total sale amount.
Player Rewards & Leaderboards
Many games offer daily sign-in bonuses. What if you could be rewarded for signing in with teensy bits of EpicCoin? Unlocking achievements while playing could also be a great way to earn EpicCoin.
Beyond simple achievements, a blockchain-powered leaderboard would prevent leaderboard fraud and each user would be inexplicably linked to their EpicCoin address where all achievements would be immutably written to the blockchain as living, breathing proof of the work and time you put into the game.
Twitch Betting
Of all the ideas I’ve mentioned so far, this one is my favorite. Twitch (and other streaming platforms) could integrate EpicCoin in a way that would let viewers bet on various outcomes of a certain streamers game. With Sports Betting being legalized in the U.S. there is a huge market left relatively untapped — for now.
Since Fortnite operates in a 100v100 Battle Royale style, you could even make bets for how long a certain player will last in the game, whether or not they will win, and more.
Game Currency Conversion
Let’s be honest — Fortnite is here for now. But in 1, 2, 3 years it may be old hat. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use a certain game’s currency in other games? In this article we’ve been exploring the theoretical idea of EpicCoin, a cryptocurrency generated by Epic Games.
Since Epic Games has produced other games like Shadow Complex, Infinity Blade, and Unreal Tournament, wouldn’t it be nice if the money I put into Fortnite could be used there? Imagine that I get bored of Fortnite and switch to Infinity Blade. I could sell my Fortnite stuff, earn EpicCoin tokens, then enter the Infinity Blade world and buy items there. My hard work wouldn’t be wasted and the EpicCoin I earned woud be justified.
Eventually, EpicCoin could get listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges and traded for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and fiat money as well.
Wrapping Up
As I hope you can see, there are many ways that Fortnite could “go crypto”. As cool as they may be, several of the ideas listed here are merely novel and don’t require blockchain technology to work or be successful. But I do believe that blockchain can help legitimize supply and demand and that a tradable token like EpicCoin could boost the video game market as a whole by enabling users to maintain the value they put into a game by being able to truly own it, transfer it, sell it, and more. I see this as a means to win a larger share of the hearts of gamers worldwide.
Epic Games, paired with a technology like Blockstart could easily launch their own blockchain, create a cryptocurrency like EpicCoin, build digital assets (with a fixed supply) like in-game items, and incentivize users in so many more ways than they are right now.
The aim of Blockstart is to empower developers to use blockchain technology without needing to be blockchain experts. We believe that blockchain can’t reach mass adoption until the tools are developer-friendly. And I don’t mean just for blockchain developers. Mobile-first is a very important paradigm and the Blockstart SDKs for iOS, Android, and Unity are the first step in pushing blockchain towards mass-adoption.
If you’re interested in Blockstart, check out the Cache token sale – Cache is the cryptocurrency that will power Blockstart and Cacheout. Read more on our site: https://getcache.io
