April 2017: the Month Blockchain Gaming Hit the Big Time

We’ve been covering the blockchain gaming phenomenon for two years, now, starting with a review of Moonga by Everdreamsoft. Since then, many new developments in the blockchain gaming space have emerged, inspiring the creation of a dedicated website and community (follow us on Twitter, as well).

This year, things heated up even more, firmly establishing blockchain gaming as a new and rapidly-growing industry. Due to a confluence of circumstances—some intentional, some not—April is proving to be a crucial turning point. Here are just some of the reasons you’ll wish you’d invested your cryptocurrency in video games sooner.

CoinFest

Alongside NewsBTC, CoinFest is another partner project to blockchaingaming.com. So it’s no surprise that blockchain gaming played a major role this year in the first and still only decentralized autonomous convention for alternative currency.

CoinFest UK featured a demo booth for Beyond the Void, whose team additionally presented at the conference. CoinFest UK also hosted a server for Battlecoin, a multiplayer game where players compete for Bitcoin. Elsewhere, Christian Moss from MandelDuck released an awesome VR block explorer on Steam in time for the events, and—together with myself and Anari from Gamerholic—participated in a panel hosted by Blocktalk.

A major and unprecedented event also occurred in the Huntercoin community. Its original founder had previously announced a new project called Chimaera, which hopes to become a decentralized platform for games. A snapshot was taken of the HUC blockchain on April 5th with the intention of noting and rewarding coin holders, who await news of when Chimaera will release so they can claim free CHI tokens.

Although some prominent community members remain skeptical of the plan, it caused the price of HUC to spike to over 11,600 satoshis on Poloniex, an all-time high market cap and increase of over 400% from April 1st. However, coins were not burned in the process, so the price quickly crashed back down to around 3,250. It has since climbed past 4,500 satoshis—a nice 50% increase—but the future of the protocol (and its coin) remains uncertain.

True Ownership

CoinFest UK wasn’t the only event the Beyond the Void team attended. That was actually just a small part of their European tour, which began on April 6th at the Blockshow in Germany. They spent the next two days in Manchester before heading to Évry, France, followed by the Insomnia (where they’re still promoting) and Geek Touch gaming festivals later in the month. This has translated to an increase of around 70% in Nexium prices since April began.

That’s because you’ll need Nexium to buy in-game assets, which will be stored and freely traded on the Ethereum blockchain. This is in stark contrast to traditional MMOs, which restrict your ability to exchange assets in order to appease financial regulators who could confiscate their central server. This also means that nobody can take your stuff, a cornerstone of blockchain gaming.

This concept was pioneered with Spells of Genesis, another trading card game by Everdreamsoft. On April 20th, it will be the first blockchain-based video game to be commercially released thanks to the help of major publisher Channel 4. With over 200 levels supposed to be ready at launch, prices have already risen almost 50% in anticipation, and could more than double if they reach their all-time high (and the coin supply has decreased since then).

Augmentors—yet another game inspired by Spells of Genesis—is also seeing some major activity. Much-awaited for its Pokémon GO-like features, its Databit tokens listed on Bittrex and spiked when the month began. After falling to a new support line at around 15,000 satoshis and hovering for over a week, DTB prices eventually climbed to more than double that. Despite not being listed on Poloniex or having been properly updated by coinmarketcap.com, this gives it an effective market cap of around $7.5 million.

GameCredits MobileGo

GameCredits is a universal payment medium for the gaming industry, bringing all of the advantages of cryptocurrency to traditional game developers. Rather than skip ahead to on-chain assets and worlds, they’ve chosen to focus on basics such as quality APIs, which has allowed them to reach hundreds of mobile game developers. All of them will be listed on the Mobile Store, which is analogous to (but less centralized than) Steam.

To fund this, they’ve created the MobileGo token and crowdsale, which debuts April 25th. It will be the first to utilize two blockchains simultaneously, in this case Waves and Ethereum, allowing for redundancy in case of failure as well as a wider variety of features. This will include the use of smart contracts for decentralized tournaments and a marketplace for game assets, as well.

Participants in the MobileGo ICO will get a discount for paying with GameCredits, which will also then be supplemented by Ethereum and Waves technology. As a result, GAME skyrocketed around 70% in April to an all-time high, completing its once-tenuous upward triangle. Its market cap now dominates the blockchain gaming industry (and most cryptocurrencies) at almost $35 million.

Any readers who were skeptical before should definitely be interested, now. It would have been impossible to pick a losing blockchain gaming token this month. Keep following the website, community and Twitter if you don’t want to miss out on the next major push for the Moon.