Shrimp On Prozac with Ether Games

The viral success of Ethereum dApps such as Pepe Farm, Ether Cartel and Ether Shrimp Farm are clogging the Ethereum blockchain. DappRadar indicates that within a timeframe of 24 hours 4chan game titles were able to amass about 26,000 transactions for virtual drugs, shrimps, memes, and frogs. These transactions resulted in the escalation of fees by about $0.2 (Ethereum network uses Gas, a special unit for calculating fees).

The Ethereum blockchain has recently started to become a popular platform for game development.

These games might be a reminiscent of the CryptoKitties game which allows users to create virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain and was attributed to significantly slowing down the blockchain for a period as users and bots alike traded cats for prices reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. CryptoKitties is a game that has no real gaming elements, you purchase a token, it can be any collectible: a virtual country, a celebrity or (drugs!) anything else. Then you expect to sell them for more and get profit. So mostly first players really see best returns. Even more profits can be gained by early investors to platforms like Abyss, CryptoHIT and IQeon by buying the tokens during pre-sale.

Collecting virtual cats becomes boring quickly, but the concept of non-fungible digital assets represented on the blockchain is immensely useful for games. There are good reasons for the emergence of crypto-gaming. Almost all Ethereum games have one thing in common — they are all open source. It means that everyone can read the code of the game and make sure it does not have anything shady. On the one hand, the blockchain is ideal for ensuring fairness, particularly in user-to-user transactions in games. It also allows tracking digital assets, such as game characters, items or resources, know their history and protect their value.

How profitable blockchain games can be?

Studying the DappRadar we can make an educated guess.

Over 10 million dollars is circulating in Ethereum games each week.

From each transaction developer gets a fee, usually it is 3–5% of transaction value. So, when the game goes viral, a developer can earn $500,000 dollars a day.