The Gaming Industry Will Lead Blockchain in our Everyday Lives
Recently had a chance to chat with Al Meyers who consulted Monetizr team about the gaming industry. Food for thoughts — #1 once you develop a hit game, it is like a gift that keeps on giving but creating the same success twice is rare and #2 cross-platform game-play is still some time away even with rapid technological developments.
What’s going on in the gaming industry currently?
In some perspectives, the market is the same as it was 20 years ago. It’s still all about making a great game. Another thing — whether people will find your game. The gaming industry is still a hit-driven business and it’s still very hard to develop a hit.
I see mobile being a very rapidly growing segment. Smartphones now are ubiquitous. Everyone has a phone and mobile is already mainstream. It is the fastest-growing segment in the gaming market and will continue to be. Because the barriers to entry are low and cost to make a game on mobile is still lower than on other platforms it’ll continue to be an enormously competitive field.
But once you develop a hit game, it’s like a gift that keeps on giving. You can continue to make sequels and the probability of failure is quite low. On the downside, it is hard to replicate this success looking at some of the studios.
I predict further consolidation of game studios. There will be a few leading studios like King that have a large portfolio of games. This diversifies their financial risk and can focus on managing their growth, trying not to fall into the traps that Zynga hit a few years ago when they grew too fast and were forced to downsize and reinvent themselves afterward.
One thing I have to mention is the console business.
Some people say this is going to be the last console generation but I believe hardcore gamers will gravitate back to the consoles.
The costs of developing these games will go up, but as mentioned earlier, gaming is hit-driven. It is like a movie business from some perspectives, and consoles specialize in these high CPU games and have the processing power to display robust, high-quality graphics games.
Where is Monetizr’s place in this space?
I believe that the gaming industry will lead to blockchain deployment, and Monetizr’s technology is tailor-made for games. There are incentives and there are rewards. For me, it will be exciting to see if Monetizr, and I believe it’s going to be Monetizr, will be the first to create a universal game token and become the pioneer in terms of how we reward gamers, allowing real-world monetization or in-game rewards.
Is the future of the gaming headed to have one segment more dominant than the others?
I believe we’re going to live in a world where you can play the game on any kind of device. There is “games everywhere” strategy that PlayStation has been trying to put in place. I’m not sure that technology is quite there yet. You can’t really play a large console type game on a comparatively small smartphone screen. There are still latency issues in certain parts of the world. We will see the developers customizing and personalizing the content for the device, though.
Here are some things I don’t see happening — console gamers gravitating to PC streaming as computers were not built for that kind of horsepower and graphics, and AR/VR becoming mainstream. They are too niche at this moment.
You will also see a continued growth in eSports.
Like mobile, it is a very fast-growing segment. It’s still in the early stages with lots of fragmentation, still a lot of Wild West. I expect to see more consolidation and maturity in that space. Not run like one league per se, as there are many games. Advertising in that space should skyrocket.
