There has been a lot of exciting announcements around the cryptocurrency gaming industry in particular over the last year. Some of these big announcements have been from big players that have been getting involved in the crypto gaming industry.
Non Fungible Tokens
Non Fungible Tokens are collector’s items, unique playing cards, pokemon, crypto kitties and of these different things. In order for Non Fungible Tokens to exist, we need to have the right tokens that will allow the existence of these unique assets. ERC-721, ERC-1155 and ERC-998 token standards allowed for things like the owning of unique assets, lowering gas cost etc. which are very important when it comes to actually have a game that you can play that lets people easily swap or interact with these unique game items and that’s just on Ethereum. But Ethereum is not the only big blockchain working on the gaming industry.
As Non Fungible tokens are rising, we obviously need some exchange to trade these tokens. Thus, welcoming NFT or Non Fungible Token marketplaces. CryptoKitties is one of the big initial use cases of Non Fungible Tokens but we have seen the marketplaces for Non Fungible Tokens increasing. We have OpenSea and RareBits which came on earlier in the year allowing users to very easily sell their game assets directly outside of the game’s internal environment.
Sale of Non Fungible Tokens
Sales of Non Fungible tokens over the last year has been really crazy. We had a GodsUnchained card which was sold for $60,000, we have a crypto kitty which was sold for $170,000 and we have a virtual real estate selling on Decentraland for $200,000. All these events show that there is money interested in these virtual assets and in playing these virtual games there are a lot of people that are interested in having that experience. In terms of experiences, we are seeing more second layer applications being built by third-party developers to help expand these ecosystems.
User Experience
An important part of this developing ecosystem is, of course, the user experience. It’s going to be hard for us to ever attract people to come from their very easy user experience game to a blockchain game unless the experience is good. Metamask is quite awesome and has been an industry standard for quite a while but the still the user-friendliness is not totally there. We have been seeing more efforts to make the overall experience of interacting with blockchains and blockchain based Dapps more user-friendly. For example, Opera has now integrated an Ethereum wallet that will be a really important step. Now we need to see Firefox, Google Chrome, and others actually integrate wallets into the browser to make it easier to interact with blockchains on the internet. Opera was the first mover in terms of actually offering an integrated blockchain experience into their browser, others will certainly follow.
Ethereum’s scalability issue:
CryptoKitties interestingly proved a very important point about Ethereum that it has serious scalability issues. The interesting thing to see is that other blockchains are moving in to fill in that space. We can see more and more people looking to develop their blockchain based games over on EOS. Tron is putting on the table $100 million for a development fund specifically focused on getting people to build games on TRON which is a serious commitment to the gaming industry and if TRON can get some giant game built on it, it could be massive.
Cocos
Cocos has just launched their testnet and it is one of the world’s biggest game engines. There are so many developers that are building their games on top of Cocos and to see them actually bringing in this blockchain implementation is very significant and will be a big boost to the overall cryptocurrency gaming space. This is a team that understands what it takes to build games, to bring games to life, what developers need and obviously how to integrate all of this with the blockchain.
The potential use case for cryptocurrency and gaming is very exciting. Imagine if we had a Fortnite or a World of Warcraft built using blockchain for people who are having to interact with blockchain all the time. This would be massive in terms of actually driving demand for cryptocurrencies even if just for fractional amounts of Gas it could be huge without a doubt.
