By Ravi Chamria
Though it is a fact that gaming has turned so huge in the last 1 decade that it has dwarfed Hollywood in terms of market capitalization, it wouldn’t be an understatement to say that accessibility of monetization for all, improved game-play, absolute transparency must be improved from grounds up not to dilute its absolute dominance.
Blockchains have fit in as a technology emancipator, bolstering and helping the sector overcome archaic challenges to keep the needle moving.
Monetizing Game Play and Restricting Barriers
Professional gamers have built invisible walls through their expertise in their gaming profession that salaries, sponsorships, live streaming, donations, and other income heads revolve around them. So, when average or newbies in gaming try to enter the space, they face an existential crisis under professional gamers’ influence.
In order to monetize their skills, they need to catch up with their professional peers, aka pro-gamers with years of experience under their feathers. Hence, a lot of catching to do, creating deep crevasses in entry. The club-based gaming model in traditional Web 2 gaming is largely closed for newbies to aid monetization.
Blockchains are engineered so that there’s no concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations reinventing the game economy through their whims and fancies. As a result, free participation is simple. Gamers can tap P2E or Play to Earn models to monetize in-game time.
Moreover, by selling in-game assets or spending hours within the game environment to extract NFTs, they can tap other income streams from the game environment. In the last two years, as many as 1.22 million new wallets have turned operational, tapping into these efficacies to make money playing games.
Owning the In-Game Environment, Cutting Down Centralization
One of the greatest fears of those who take games professionally is the dilution of control. In the event of the gaming ecosystem winding up or the gaming company seizing their assets, they can lose their earnings at any moment.
By introducing blockchains, players have full control over their assets and can cross-operate in a similar gaming environment and monetize their assets through selling or utility. In addition, smart contracts can trigger true sovereignty and control over their assets through royalty schemes that can help them truly own their efforts irrespective of the game environment where those assets live. Hence, ideally reinforcing ownership through a trustless code-based function instead of a platform-governed promise.
Restoring Transparency, Building the Trust
eSports is mired in controversies involving bonus abuse, multiple accounting, affiliate frauds, account takeovers, and chargeback frauds. These factors have slowly and gradually wiped out the trust element of esports. The blame goes to the lack of verifiability and transparency.
There’s no technology stack in place that could help participants verify whether someone has won the lottery or they are roped trust-baits. Only data can safeguard against such abuses, but the present state of e-sporting is heavily disorganized. As a result, reports have shown that 1 out of 10 online games or esports are engineered fraud in the making. Blockchains level up information sharing, and its noble consensus restores security while maintaining transparency.
Blockchains Fortifying The Future of Gaming
Gaming demands a twin approach where gameplay should be simple, and cost-efficiency shouldn’t be diluted. Since the blockchain consensus mechanism is distributed, it weighs down the scalability that app chains, roll-ups, and side-chains have resolved from the front. As far as simplifying the user experience, the EIP-4337 upgrade, which introduces account abstraction, mirrors the Web 2 gaming experience in Web 3. With time, as roll-ups and side chains mature further, they could amplify scalability and interoperability to build a comprehensive gaming ecosystem on top of blockchains to ensure maximum extractable value.
