Cryptocurrency and Gaming – A match made in heaven

Blockchain technology is sometimes referred to as disruptive and it’s not just in the financial sector, many industries will be affected by this technology. One them seems to be already ahead of the curve. We are talking about the gaming industry. Cryptocurrencies and videogames are a match made in heaven. Why? Because virtual currencies have existed in video games almost since their birth. High scoring systems were, and are, frequently associated with the number of coins, gems or any kind of valuable token you could get your hands on (usually by defeating bad guys or smashing/lockpicking treasure chests). Role playing games (RPGs) were the first ones to popularize in-game economies, where you could buy or sell items (loot) for money. But they were strictly offline, tied only to the imaginary world of the game and having no value outside of it. It’s also important to know that these were the times of the Pay-to-Play model, if you wanted to play a game you would have to buy it. In the old days, people would go to the arcades and then that slowly evolved into gaming consoles and personal computers. Then, with the birth of internet gaming, a new genre of games, MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game), started to show complex virtual currency-based markets, where you could exchange virtual goods, or so called loot, for in-game currency. Although it wasn’t possible to sell these virtual goods for money, there were many cases of people selling their highly valued accounts for money in the real world. Simultaneously, the first Free-to-Play games were introduced, where you could play the game for free but any additional content would cost you extra. These are also known as “Fremium” games.

Then, in 2009, we saw the dawn of internet money with the creation of Bitcoin. Although there are already games where players can actually trade virtual goods for real money, bitcoin based games were the first ones to introduce, what is called, the Play-for-Pay model. In these specifics games the player receives a very small amount of bitcoins, called satoshis, for playing the game. The money received is a small percentage of the revenue made by in-game publicity. Another revolutionary game, that was also a cryptocurrency, was Motocoin. Motocoin was the first cryptocurrency to implement a proof-of-play protocol. In contrast with the proof-of-work protocol, used by Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies. In proof-of-play, coins can only be mined by cognitive workload, or in other words, by playing the game.

Now we are seeing more and more projects that try to take advantage of the blockchain technology in the gaming space. In Beyond the Void, the first blockchain-based MOBA, there will be a decentralized market place where any virtual goods already have an inherent virtual currency value. Without cryptocurrencies, the virtual markets of the games rely on central servers, making it impossible to exchange virtual goods between games. New projects like Game Credits and Hyper create decentralized platforms that serve an economic ecosystem between games, where one single cryptocurrency or token is accepted and used by different online games.

This is also the case for BitCrystals, which is a crypto asset issued on the Bitcoin blockchain through the CounterParty platform. These act as both the game-fuel and the premium in-game currency in Spells of Genesis, the first blockchain-based trading card game. Similar to the other tokens above, BitCrystals can be traded on the blockchain. Cards are also assets on the Bitcoin blockchain and can be exchanged directly on the CounterParty decentralized exchange.

BitCrystals were issued wiith a limited supply of 100 000 000 units and 70% of the total supply was offered for sale during the BitCrystals Token Sale. BitCrystals can be traded on the blockchain or used to purchase blockchain-based cards, playable within Moonga and Spells of Genesis.

Spells of Genesis (SoG) is the first blockchain-based trading card game: its storyline and in-game economy are both based on blockchain technology.

It only seems fitting that cryptocurrencies and video games should go hand in hand. They come from similar tech cultures, and are used by global online communities. To put it simply, they are mostly used by geeks, computer people, the only difference is that video games are widely more well known and accepted. But remember the dark days of video games? Gaming was once underground and obscure before it became mainstream, and the same thing seems to be happening to cryptocurrencies.