The gaming industry is continually growing; it expands to different niches and attracts a bigger audience every day. In January 2019, gaming industry revenue in the United States alone reached 893 million USD. With the rise of eSports and new technologies, the sector is thriving. eSports such as League of Legends, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike are generating millions in revenue and attracting a multimillion audience around the globe. Not to mention, innovations as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), robotics, internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming the way people approach games and reshape the whole industry. However, not only the mentioned innovations impact gaming but also blockchain technology is affecting the sector. In this article, we will discuss blockchain use cases in the gaming industry and possible ways how it could reshape it.

The Role of Blockchain in the Gaming Industry

In most cases, blockchain is associated with the finance industry, but you might be surprised that the technology has been in the gaming sector for quite some time. Some examples of the games based on blockchain are HunterCoin, Miner Simulator, Cryptokitties. Cryptokitties became so popular among crypto communities that prices for one virtual pet reached $170,000. The concept of the game is simple: you collect digital cats, breed and trade them. The prompting idea inspired more gaming companies to change their old methods and implement blockchain. However, this innovation is not only a fun way to boost gaming, but it also has many benefits for the gaming industry’s growth.

Blockchain Can Detect Fraud

Revenue loss due to fraud is one of the most severe issues facing the gaming industry. As many platforms don’t have operations to authorize players and exchange they make on the system, it opens the door to fraudsters. It is common to buy and exchange virtual assets, but without a reliable system, it’s hard to trust other game players and avoid scams. However, blockchain could quickly change that by providing all the necessary data to prove authenticity. The system is transparent, which makes it hard to be hacked or altered. High security and privacy features ensure fraud-free exchange.

Ownership of Virtual Assets

Many video games offer a wide range of virtual assets to enhance your performance in a game. These digital items can cost from as low as a few game-earned tokens to thousands of dollars. Sadly, it creates ideal conditions for scammers to sell and exchange fake or worthless virtual goods. How could blockchain transform it? Players can store their assets on a digital distributed ledger and provide proof of authorized ownership. Blockchain has high immutability levels, thus corrupting data would be almost impossible. That would make the gaming industry more reliable, and generate more revenue due to legal sales and purchases.

Payments on Blockchain

Cryptocurrency is growing its audience among gamers. This additional payment option allows proceeding with purchases faster and safer. Also, as cryptocurrency is based on a digital distributed ledger, it doesn’t have any central point of authority. In other words, there’s no middleman to control processes and take extra fees for payments. Safety is another fundamental issue: players risk of losing money if a transaction is lost due to the lack of transparency or frauds. Thus, blockchain could bring fresh and innovative solutions to protect and liberate payments for the gaming industry.

Broader Gaming Spaces

Blockchain is a shared database which gives a feature of connecting different users. Not only that, if you, as a player, have virtual assets and store it on blockchain, you can transform them into different gaming universes. The technology allows different blockchain gaming companies to connect their games and expand existing gaming platforms. As blockchain can store significant amounts of data, it is possible to verify all the virtual assets using smart contracts.

The gaming industry is rapidly changing, and technologies as blockchain enhance it to go even further. Video games 2019 are undeniably different from the ones that we used to play a few years ago. As the world is developing, casual activities as playing games extend accordingly. With the rise of blockchain technology, we can already see the improvement in gaming security, assets exchange, additional payment options. So if we want to go further, we have to embrace these positive processes and accelerate the enhancement.