Gaming Freedom Restored, Thanks to Blockchain
How the principles of crypto gaming could fix games like Hearthstone
I have a confession to make. I was never into trading card or collectible card games. Then, in 2014, Hearthstone came along. The lively graphics, charming cast of characters and easy-to-understand mechanics convinced me that I had to give it a try. To my surprise, I was instantly hooked.
Hearthstone became my go-to game whenever I had any free time. I spent my lunch hour at work building decks and completing quests. At night, before bed, I’d try to improve my game in Casual mode and gave it a few goes in the Arena. I soon discovered the exhilaration of moving up the ladder in Ranked mode. But, as time went by, I realized getting past a certain rank was becoming near impossible. Basic decks would just not do anymore.
Up until then, I had gotten by with the gold earned through quests and cards I got from the Arena. But my decks were still pretty basic, I had too many duplicates, and I suffered from a sore lack of Legendaries. Even as I spent tons of Arcane Dust disenchanting my duplicates to craft cards that would take my game to the next level, it still wasn’t enough to stay competitive. So I decided to take a break from the game. When I came back, months later, I found myself so far behind in the metagame that I’d have to get a ton of new cards just to catch up. I was faced with the conundrum every casual player eventually arrives at: pony up the cash or give up. I chose the latter, and so I quit Hearthstone for good.
Now, you may be thinking, this all came down to the choices I made rather than the game itself being wrong or broken. And you’d be right. Games like Hearthstone, marketed as they may be “for all audiences,” eventually whittle down to those who are willing to spend the time or the money. Unlike me, there are players who have no problem spending hundreds of dollars buying cards, putting up with endless duplicates so that one day they’ll have enough Legendaries to keep them at the top of the ranks. But even those players have a breaking point.
Since the beginning, Blizzard has put out expansions as a way to breathe new life into the game. But in the past two years, they have ramped this strategy way up. Three expansions were released just in 2017, issuing more than 100 new cards every four months. Players these days haven’t got nearly enough time to get the cards, learn the mechanics, and improve their game before they have to do it all over again. Countless Reddit threads and message boards show evidence of player burnout. And yet, Blizzard has no reason to change things.
Blizzard reported record-breaking revenues for the launch of Knights of the Frozen Throne, and have mentioned they will also release three expansion packs in 2018. This direction seems to be working for Hearthstone, moneywise. But is this the best that an online card game can do?
Magic The Gathering is the ultimate TCG, having been around for decades. One of the main reasons for its longevity is the fact that the cards in the game have intrinsic value. Players can trade and sell them as they see fit. The online version gives you the ability to do this as well, but only within the game’s ecosystem. If a player is banned or loses their account for any reason, the cards are gone forever — along with the investment the player made to obtain them. It may seem as though it’s impossible to get the same experience as a physical card game in an online environment. But that’s where the blockchain comes in.
A TCG or CCG on the blockchain would give us the high quality of a game like Hearthstone, with the most valuable elements of a physical card game like Magic The Gathering. Why? Because items bought by players belong to them fully. A casual player like me, with money to spend but an unwillingness to waste it on booster packs full of duplicates, would have the freedom to purchase only the cards they need for the decks they want to build. And hardcore players, traditionally less stingy with their purse strings, would find that every dollar they spend now goes a lot further. It would take away the uncertainty and disappointment of spending hundreds of dollars on random cards, many of which become useless as soon as a new expansion is released.
Card pack mechanics in current iterations of CCGs, such as Hearthstone, are exploitative by nature. It’s a way for publishers to drive spending artificially rather than dictated by the needs of the game. Building such a game on the blockchain would eliminate that loophole, forcing developers to be creative once again. It’s a golden opportunity to create something unique wherein players can focus on improving their skill rather than on how many more packs they need to stay competitive.
A trading card game on the blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the genre by, ironically, bringing back the fundamental elements that made the physical versions of these games so popular in the first place: true ownership and control of game assets. And I think that’s something all players, from hardcore fans to dropouts like me, would love to see.
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.
