Blockchain Gaming: challenges and promises
Is this technology really everywhere? With all of its limits and challenges, games based in non-expendable assets keep growing.
As we’ve already stated in this blog, it’s almost a universal rule that every new technology will quickly be used to play. Blockchain, one of the latest innovations to take the world by storm, is also a testing ground for gaming.
What does the technology behind the world of cryptocurrency have to do with videogames? Does the techie zone of international finances have a fun side?
The key is in the concept of non-expendable tokens: unique goods that are not interchangeable for others of the same value. For example, if I have a 20 dollar bill, I can exchange it for another and I won’t have lost or won anything. However, I probably wouldn’t trade my dog for another, even if they are both good boys.
Those assets can either be cards, skins, kittens like in CryptoKitties, one of the most emblematic games of that genre, or parcels in a virtual reality world such as in Decentraland.
The emerging field of blockchain gaming has many advantages and attractions but it also faces great challenges. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
Advantages
- Decentralization: According to blockchain, games exist as a decentralized digital record, public and unchangeable. That makes them belong to everyone and no one at the same time.
- Security: As we were saying before, most games are based on acquiring and trading goods. Blockchain makes sure the assets are unique, scarce and that they truly belong to the users, and reliably store globally positioned boards. All this helps prevent fraud.
- Economy: Cryptocurrency can be used as a payment method, but also as a prize users obtain for their effort in play-to-earn games.
Difficulties
- Scalability: Blockchain based games face limitations caused by their relative slow pace and the cost of the transactions, and that is why they tend to be pretty simple. Also, adding computational complexity often causes the network to become congested. All of these issues can be fixed, but at the expense of centralizing its operation.
- Accesibility: In the video game industry we always aim for the user’s first experience to be simple, swift and smooth. But, in this case, it can be pretty messy for someone unfamiliar with the cryptocurrency world, because they will suddenly have their own wallet, they will have to register, purchase currencies and understand everything that’s going on. The result is that 97% and 99% of the new users give up in the onboarding stage.
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In spite of all this, games work: leaders in this sector such as EOS Dynasty, My Crypto Heroes and Prospectors have something like 4,000 daily users, and new games are launched constantly. Because of the changes app stores made to the restrictions for apps that use cryptocurrency, more and more mobile devices are using this.
The needs of this new field push the boundaries of technology and will most likely keep driving innovations in non-expendable tokens. In the meantime, in spite of the existing difficulties, these games can be a way into the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency for beginners.
