How the distributed technologies and the blockchain systems change the game industry

The industry of video games is experiencing rapid growth, and the popularity of online broadcasts of major e-sports tournaments attracts an audience comparable in size to the audience of traditional sports events. Moreover, this phenomenon already claims for official recognition from far from virtual sports associations and committees: for example, the International Olympic Committee allows the holding of the first ever Olympic video game tournament in 2024. About 58 million people around the world call themselves professional gamers. The total profit of platforms that allow organizing cyber-tournaments is approaching $ 1 billion, and, according to some estimates, in just a few years it will gain another billion. This popularity of video games has led to the emergence of several related industries, one of which is the sale and purchase of virtual items, such as skins and weapons. If skins serve mainly to amuse the player's pride, then weapons often play a decisive role in virtual battles. Nevertheless, skins, which have no practical value even in the virtual world, are sold for quite real money. Some of them, considered rare, go to new owners for 15 thousand dollars.

According to experts in the field of the gaming industry, the consequences for such explosive growth in demand for virtual goods may not be the most pleasant.

"It happens in a lot of games, where there are markets and auctions that allow players to exchange goods. This is actually terrible, because someone plays the game four years for 20 hours a week, and suddenly all of his achievements are depreciating. It's as if you bought a house, did some serious repairs there, and then you were forced to move to another house, and everything you put into the first house would go to waste, "says Valve CEO Gabe Newell.

On the Internet, there are quite a lot of virtual marketplaces designed to make it easier for players to sell and buy virtual objects. Their combined turnover has left far behind profits from the hosting of e-sports tournaments, and is currently estimated at about $ 50 billion. More than 400 million people around the world are selling, buying or exchanging in-game items.
Trade in virtual goods in practice is not so much decentralized as fragmented. In many countries of the world there are competing marketplaces, on which various business strategies are used, and which, therefore, offer their clients completely different sets of possibilities.
Moreover, there is a vast "gray" market for virtual goods, the volume of which is difficult to assess precisely because of its semi-official nature.

Blockchain in the gaming industry

Such a rapid growth of the whole industry determines its need for innovative solutions, and therefore many platforms and companies working in this industry pay attention to the technology of blockchain. Proposals of such companies vary within a fairly wide range - from the creation of e-sports decentralized platforms, such as EloPlay, to the development of a special crypto currency for trading in virtual goods, such as SkinCoin.
The latter, for example, propose to solve this problem by creating a single crypto currency that would replace the monetary aspect of virtual goods and thereby allow gamers to buy and sell such objects not for profit but for game purposes.
Another solution is offered by the WAX ​​project, developed by the founders of OPSkins, which leads the market of centralized marketplace for trading in virtual goods. It is a decentralized platform, working as Amazon for virtual goods. The developers note that the abundance of local platforms, each of which offers its own work system, creates a global imbalance between supply and demand in the field of virtual objects.
Each user will be able to manage a fully functional virtual market without investing in his development any money. Also WAX offers a widget for the exchange of virtual goods, and the security of transactions while this will be guaranteed by blockchain technology.
The DMarket project also develops a marketplace based on blockchain and smart contracts, allowing you to exchange (or sell) virtual objects from different gaming universes. Smart contracts in this system are used as a bridge between the game worlds, through which virtual values ​​move.
Voxelus uses Litecoin-based crypto currency to implement the marketplace of games that users themselves can create on the project platform. The creators of the solution are proud of the fact that for this the user absolutely does not need to have an idea of ​​programming, and the whole process takes place in a specially designed desktop application running on Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.
Although these companies are by far not the only ones that implement blockchain technologies in the gaming industry, their examples are a good illustration of how innovations penetrate this industry from different angles. As the virtual reality densely intertwines with the real world, the trend towards blockchain becomes more and more noticeable. Also, this further strengthens the already obvious trend towards the tokenization of the industry: each of these projects releases its native tokens, intended for financial transactions on the relevant platform.
The gaming industry was one of the first in which mass introduction of decentralized technologies began. And although this process is far from over, it seems obvious that after a few years centralized solutions in this area may be in the minority.