Gaming is becoming a broader and broader term today. Millennials have grown up with original game consoles like the Nintendo or the first PlayStation.

They later transitioned to PC gaming, which only got better and better as technology and we(me included) grew up.

Today, PC gaming is not in the frontlines as much as it used to be.

Mobile gaming is taking over the industry. People are hooked on arcade-style games, but there are increasingly more complicated games coming out for mobile as well, like L2 Revolution, a full-scale MMORPG on your phone.

Blizzard Entertainment, a popular game development company that

is responsible for the likes of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has recently announced that the next installment of their popular franchise Diablo will be coming out on mobile as well; Diablo Immortal.

The gaming industry in itself is growing year over year. Last year it was worth $132 billion, and that’s not all, it is expected to continue to grow at an increasingly quicker rate. The reason behind is definitely the increase of new users as capable smartphones become affordable to everyone. But even more important is the increased supply and demand for games that drive users to play and spend money on in-game items.

CS: GO, League of Legends, Dota 2, Fortnite, PUBG, WarZ among others, have all been the big titles of this decade. They have all introduced a new spectacle for gamers of all makes, which drove them to a wallet-grabbing-money-throwing craze in an effort to score big on obtaining a valuable game asset, which would enhance a character’s appearance in some way.

Most of the time a game introduced a “digital chest” which contained a number of items, varying in rarity and appearance. These 2 factors combined would introduce a scarcity among these items and their value would go up as players began buying and selling them on the Steam Marketplace. Platforms like Steam, which hosted games like CS: GO and Dota 2, would allow users to trade items between themselves, but taking these items outside of the Steam network and trade them for items in a newer game like Fortnite was not at all possible. Users were stuck with the time and money spent in a game.

Game companies like Ubisoft are starting to wake up to the potential of using blockchain in their games. With the recent announcement by the company that “they’re looking into the Ethereum blockchain for a solution to provide their users with more freedom of choice of what they can do with their digital property or achievements.”

That is not to say that Ubisoft is the first to realize the great potential blockchain has for gaming. It is de-facto one of the top 5 use-cases of blockchain, actually, and companies like Enjin have already realized this 2 years ago.

Using the Ethereum network to record the creation and transferring of game assets, users can bring the game items with them outside of the game they found them in, and perhaps use them somewhere else or trade them with other players.

Enjin, a company building on Ethereum has been developing tools for developers and gamers to use to realize this vision. There are already over 25 games being built using Enjin Development Tools. Tools like the Unity SDK — a plugin for the popular game development engine. Gamers of all creeds, religions, and locations are using the Enjin Wallet to hold and trade their game items.

So while Ubisoft is a bit late to the party, this is only validation that the use of the Ethereum blockchain solves a big problem for gamers.

With the introduction of Google Stadia, VR headsets, bigger mobile screens, better batteries, faster processors and even the blockchain, the future of gaming is getting better and better. Perhaps gamers could find work just by playing games, as was a dream for most, but only possible for professionals in e-Sports, until now.