As the largest gaming event of the year ramps up, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3, we at Groundhog are closely tracking the role blockchain will play in the future of the gaming industry.

From 1970 to current day, a time period of just 47 years, gaming has grown into a $50 billion industry ripe with potential. Recently, battle royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds have caught fire, achieving massive popularity in the gaming industry. Fortnite alone has captured the attention of over 125 million players globally.

Last year’s E3 exhibition had a turnout of 68,000 attendees, the biggest yet, this year’s numbers are expected to top that.

With modern innovations, the gaming industry just received the shot of adrenaline it needs to continue this momentum and turn the industry into one that is as profitable, and if not more profitable, than the sporting industry. Blockchain will be the technology to evolve the gaming industry into a frontier filled with full-time gamers and wealthy developers.

Here’s how the growth of blockchain and gaming could be compounded as they grow together:

Monetizing Gaming

In the early days of video games, physical copies drove retail sales. Today, this is less common due to the convenience of owning a digital copy of a game. To pay for digital copies of games, you currently need a credit card attached to an account. This allows you purchase anything available on your platform’s gaming marketplace.

The logical evolution of this already almost completely digital industry is to move to a digital currency. This currency would be used for frictionless transactions inside and out of the gaming marketplace. This is exactly what cryptocurrency will provide to the industry; we believe games will adopt a more generalized cryptocurrency to enable economic fluidity between games.

Purchasing new games, earning rewards through competitive gaming, accessing in game add-ons, subscriptions to premium features, and the viewers eager to fuel the careers of talented gamers streaming on Twitch, are areas ripe with opportunity for monetization through cryptocurrency.

Meet Monetizr

Monetizr is leading the charge in creating a gamer-first cryptocurrency. Monetizr is designed to allow gamers to mine it’s coin using their gaming platforms, earn the coin through playing the game or competing for brand sponsored prizes, and spend the coin on the gaming marketplace for items, subscriptions, and tangible merchandise.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though.

Blockchain Gaming Pioneers

Blockchain will actually be built into the core infrastructure of games, adding new dimensions to the gaming experience.

A great example of a blockchain based game is Cryptokitties. This game was originally created to teach people the potential of blockchain for the gaming industry. It taught people how gaming and blockchain technology could be used together while playing a healthy role in pioneering blockchain’s adoption. With Cryptokitties, people could buy one of kind virtual cats and breed them to make all kinds of new and rare kitties.

This game quickly became successful and even had a CryptoKitty purchased for over $100k. The scarcity and ability to prove a cryptokitty’s authenticity quickly demonstrated to the industry how value could be captured by using a blockchain in a game.

Blockchain Tools for Game Developers

To foster the development of games built with blockchain, brand new tools are being built that add a layer authenticity to virtual worlds that we’ve never seen before.

Enjin Coin, which actually has a presence at this year’s E3, was designed to foster the development of virtual items which people could validate their authenticity through by referencing on a public blockchain.

For example, let’s say there was a one of a kind costume created on the Enjin Coin blockchain for Fortnite players and immediately after, numerous costume replicas were made by other developers. Gamers would be able to check if a player’s costume was the genuine article or not by checking if a player’s rare costume was recorded as the real deal on the Enjin Coin blockchain.

Making the Virtual Real

This begs the question: if blockchain has been used thus far as way to for people to accept digital money, or even digital cats, as real items that have monetary value, what’s stopping blockchain from enabling other virtual items from being accepted as real?

A sword designed by an infamous game developer, one of a kind, could have its authenticity solidified through blockchain making it an incredibly valuable item, like a piece of art. A beach house on the shore of a sparkling virtual ocean could be technically owned by you and treated as if it were a regular piece of real estate, no trespassers allowed; this idea is currently being pioneered by a project called Decentraland where developers are using blockchain to enable people to purchase virtual real estate.

A virtual Marvel universe could be owned by Stan Lee and he would have complete control over who would be allowed to enter, like a modern theme park; a future team of developers could be creating universes with blockchain deeply ingrained into the project’s infrastructure.

The more advanced virtual realities become, the more realistic owning a piece of property in a game will become too. If we ever achieve a virtual reality with a level of detail indistinguishable from genuine reality, owning property in virtual reality could be just as valuable as owning real property, perhaps even more valuable due to the virtual world’s less restrictive nature.

Blurring Virtual Lines

In a previous BlockCrushr Labs podcast, Groundhog CTO, Andrew Redden, intimated that it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to see authentic items being exchanged between completely separate games.

For example, there’s no reason why someone playing Halo couldn’t trade a uniquely designed weapon for a seperate gamer’s elite level Call of Duty weapon; games just haven’t been built to accommodate for this kind of activity yet.

Blockchain will be the adhesive that actually binds all of the virtual gaming industry together. All it will take is some clever coding.

When Can we Move In to the Digital World?

The world of blockchain is exploding with innovation but we haven’t found a way for everyone to easily use all the great projects that are coming out of the industry. We are in dire need of a decentralized hub that works alongside our current lifestyle. Gamers need to be able to easily make recurring payments, check on their CryptoKitties, and send their favorite gamer some funds for their stream, all in one place.

Groundhog does exactly that. Groundhog is a powerful wallet that can be used for subscription payments, interacting with the decentralized applications (Dapps) you’ll use, and built to accommodate for any of your financial demands.

Groundhog is in development and currently signing up people for first-in-line use of the product. If you’re a Dapp developer, Groundhog is interested in learning about you too.

To sign-up for early access to Groundhog, enter you email in the form below:

Conclusion

Blockchain will provide a ton of value to the gaming industry in a variety of ways. We look forward to the coming years of blockchain-gaming innovations and will be keeping our eye-out for the first E3 that features mainstream games with blockchain built into their infrastructure. We wouldn’t at all be surprised to see this as early as at next year’s E3 2019!

Let’s Get in Touch

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