In 2017 interest in was at an all-time high. Bitcoin surged nearly 800% and Ethereum passed the $1000 mark. People were mortgaging their houses to buy up Bitcoin. While cryptocurrency has certainly gotten away from its original goal of being decentralized “digital cash,” blockchain has a lot of interesting applications that can greatly improve the world of video games.
One possible blockchain-based gaming solution is a decentralized marketplace like Game Protocol. Virtual item marketplaces for games that reward players with in-game items, like Valve’s Counterstrike: Global Offensive, could also benefit from blockchain integration. The problem with centralized economies like the Steam Community Market is that they don’t allow the player to cash out. Instead, players have to use a middleman service like PayPal or eBay. Game Protocol’s user-based review system will also ensure that the games of the best quality rise to the top whereas Steam features games based on staff curation and whatever their promotion algorithm dictates.
Centralized networks are subjected to hacks because they have a single-point-of-failure. Blockchain cannot be easily tampered with because it is decentralized. Platforms based on blockchain technology are not vulnerable to DDoS attacks, which frequently occur in online games. Always online games require the player to be connected to the game server while they play, a single-point-of-failure that can be exploited. Blockchain may even have some unexplored uses as an alternative to digital rights management (DRM) software.
In the realm of competitive gaming, the behind-the-scenes gameplay calculations are taken on faith to be true and fair. Blockchain could create a public record of the game’s logic. If the outcome of a match were to be called into question, the tournament arbiters could rerun the match footage and compare it to the blockchain record to validate that there was no foul play.
