Blockchain gaming: how cryptocurrencies help indie game developers?
With the emergence of new technologies, the digital revolution changes the rules of the game in every possible industry, gaming included. As the gaming industry is experiencing a boom, growing the fastest out of all sectors of entertainment, blockchain gaming is completely redefining how we play, create, and interact with the digital world. Games such as Axie Infinity, SplinterLands, Alien Worlds, and CryptoMines attract thousands of gamers from all around the world. What is the future of gaming with blockchain as one of the main players?
Disclaimer: This article is created for educational purposes only.
Gaming has gone a long way since arcade machines, early PC games, and Minecraft: now more than 3 billion people around the world are gamers. If you are not a gamer yourself, your brother, friend, or partner is probably one. Age does not matter: there are gamers in every age group. Gaming is universal and borderless, just like Blockchain, so the emergence of blockchain gaming introduces us to a brand-new gaming quality, which prioritizes transparency and accessibility. Did you know that as much as 55% of the Millennials gamers own crypto? For comparison, only 5% of Millennials non-gamers do.
In this article, you will learn about…
- the size of the crypto gaming community
- reasons why blockchain gaming gained many supporters
- the potential of blockchain gaming for indie game developers
- popular blockchain games
In 2020, there were 41,9 million crypto gamers in the world. Half of them resided in Asia (22,6 million), followed by Europe (5,9 million), Middle East & Africa (5,8 million), Latin America (4,3 million), and North America (3,3 million gamers). Together, they accounted for a whopping 321 million dollars of crypto gaming revenue generated in 2020.
Blockchain gaming has generated such great hype for all good reasons: it allows users to gain ownership of their gaming assets, such as skins, weapons, or avatars. In traditional games, gaming assets are owned by developers or publishers of the game, rather than gamers. In blockchain games, gamers can actually own their assets, and in turn, trade with other players or sell them.
In the future, when the network of blockchain games is greater, they might be even able to keep their digital assets while switching between different blockchain-based games. Merging gaming with blockchain created a whole new type of gamer-centered economy, in which gaming assets have real value outside a particular game. It may look like a small step for a man, but it is one giant leap for a gaming community.
Since public blockchains are open protocols, it is possible for anyone to build a game on the blockchain, which significantly lowers the entry barriers for indie game developers. According to surveys, 58% of video game developers have already started using blockchain. Why? Main answers include innovative and more interesting gameplay, securing value for players by keeping it in the game, and rewarding them with real-world value.
The potential of blockchain gaming is undeniable: even the world’s biggest game developers, such as EA and Ubisoft, publicly talked of releasing blockchain games in the future, and giant game platforms, such as Epic Games, already offer blockchain games to their users.
What also makes blockchain games different from traditional games is that they operate in different models than traditional games, namely pay-to-earn & play-to-earn. Players from all around the world can actually get paid for playing games, which completely revolutionizes the concept of gaming and rewards the most passionate community members.
Most popular blockchain games
Marketing itself as “the next generation of collectible card games”, SplinterLands made waves in the gaming community. You can play, trade, and earn rewards on SplinterLands anytime from both desktop and mobile devices. The game encourages the use of cryptocurrencies as it automatically generates a Hive cryptocurrency wallet upon registration. Moreover, it is also compatible with Ethereum, Tron, and WAX, allowing players to earn crypto and digital assets while playing the game.
Alien Worlds is an NFT metaverse, where you play with unique items — NFTs. In the game, you can earn Trilium, which gives you power as players stake it to vote in elections or increase the planet’s rewards pool. How can you play the game? The game is free to play, but you need to get a WAX wallet first. Currently, it is the largest decentralized game on Earth in terms of the number of lifetime miners, and it operates on Ethereum, WAX, and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
CryptoMines is a sci-fi NFT game set in space, which focuses on players traveling through the galaxy in search of life-giving material $ETERNAL, which is the game’s native currency. The maximum supply of $ETERNALS is 5,000,000, and it is deployed on Binance Smart Chain. It is also compatible with a web wallet Metamask.
Axie Infinity is probably the most widely known blockchain game because of its cute graphics and gamer-friendly politics. Built on Ethereum, the game is set in the Pokémon-inspired universe, where players can earn tokens either with their skills or contribution to the ecosystem. From the very beginning, it was developed to promote blockchain among the gaming community, and its great success contributed to people’s growing interest in blockchain gaming.
In November 2021, Falafel Coin published its first mobile play-to-earn game Hummus and Dragons on the Apple App Store, and Google Store will get its own version on the 6th of December. Players can get their rewards for different accomplishments, for example, climbing to the top of players’ ratings. What are the tokenomics of the game? There is an 8% overall tax on all transactions, but with a reward system in place, you can make returns on transactions. The game was designed to let gamers earn their money while they play.
