A Look at BitGuild’s Marketplace
How we’re planning to build the “Steam Market for blockchain game items”
Hail Guildmates!
My name is Yong, and I’m a Front-End Engineer at BitGuild. The marketplace was one of the first features I worked on after joining the team. Today, I’ll talk a bit about its current state and our vision for its future.
Our vision for the marketplace
The marketplace beta is part of BitGuild’s vision for gamers to fully own their in-game items on the blockchain. This entails the ability to freely sell and buy items in an open market. As most gamers already know, there are similar marketplaces for in-game items off the blockchain, most notably Steam’s.
Steam saw an opportunity to create an open marketplace back in 2012, when they discovered that their users were trading up to 500K items every week. Starting with Team Fortress 2 hats, the marketplace has since evolved to include items from over 100 different games.
BitGuild’s vision is to position our marketplace as the “Steam Market for blockchain game items.” In the the next couple of sections, I’ll go over what we’re doing now, and how we plan to achieve our vision.
Where we’re at now
The marketplace beta was launched in July to give gamers a place to buy and sell their items, with Ether Online as the first game available on the marketplace. From the start, our marketplace experience was designed to provide gamers with a quick way to search for items they wanted to buy. This included sorting and filtering features, along with the item cards themselves displaying important stats and attributes for gamers to quickly gauge their worth.
Once bought, items can be found on the My Items page, where players are free to sell any items they own, or trade them to friends. Of course, this is just a beta and we have a lot of changes coming up in the next few months.
Where we’re going
The launch of the marketplace beta is an early attempt to establish a presence among blockchain gamers as the go-to place to buy and sell their items. The future vision we have for the marketplace is a much more robust and feature-full product.
In the next couple of days, we will be releasing a new filtering system to give users a clearer way to filter items on the marketplace. After that, we’ll work on creating a transaction history feature for gamers to view what they bought, when they bought it, and who was involved in the transaction. We also plan on adding a search feature along with increasing the number of options available for sorting in the future.
Our direction and planned improvements
Finally, we have a bunch of great features planned that revolve around our gamer’s quality of life on the platform. First, we’ll be building notifications into the platform for our users. These notifications will alert users of such instances as when their items sell on the marketplace or when a successful purchase was transferred to your wallet. The Portal Team will also be building out achievements (!) into our platform so gamers can show off and brag about their in-game accomplishments.
Finally we plan on building our own blockchain wallet. This feature is the biggest quality of life change planned, allowing us to provide a vastly improved user experience to our gamers, compared to our current MetaMask solution.
We hope that you’ll join us on the journey as we continue to improve the marketplace and achieve our vision for the future of blockchain games. Stay tuned for more updates from the BitGuild Portal Team!
BitGuild’s mission is to revolutionize the global gaming industry by creating a platform for a brand new class of games that live on the blockchain. Blockchain games completely redefine the relationship between players and developers by facilitating full and true ownership of in-game assets, cheap & safe item trading, cross-game compatibility of items & currency, and more.
