I’ve been thinking about future use cases for block chain technology and where the space is going to be 10 years from now when the innovations that nobody was imagining today become widespread and common place. Today I was thinking about the gaming industry.
I’m gamer myself, and I have poured plenty of time and energy into plenty of games that I have then gone on to leave behind, forgotten. It really is crazy if you think about the amount of wealth that is wasted in man hours across the world. It literally is wasted because the assets that you acquire like gear, level-ups, and in game currency are valuable to you in the moment that you’re playing that game, but a few years later when you you’re completely over that game that accumulation sits weathering away in a save file that you may never open again. Block chain technology could really potentially change this.
What if, given a smart contract that could handle an exchange rate from one games currency to another’s, We see a future in which the gold I make on Skyrim could be transferred over to gold in World of Warcraft, then when you get tired of playing World of Warcraft you could take your in game currency there and transfer it over to Eve online or league of legends or destiny. What if you could even take these tokens and sell them on an exchange to another gamer in another country ?
Of course this would require adoption from major game studios, and different studios would have to incorporate this block chain into their game, but if we could do that an entirely new revenue stream could be made as we could actually monetize all of the hours that are otherwise seen as wasted when one plays videogames. It would certainly get my girlfriend off my back, but not only that I would even feel better about the time I spend playing video games which due to societal stigma’s has always tended to feel like a guilty pleasure, or something I’m supposed to feel guilty about .
Wouldn’t it be great if I could just sell my progress to somebody else In a transaction that takes trust out of the equation? There is already a market for this, my brother who was at one point Deep into World of Warcraft used to tell me how much money some people would spend for a fully leveled up World of Warcraft account with an epic mount, and the works. At the time I thought those prices were crazy, but now having seen the price of some crypto kitties they sound like some pretty tame prices in comparison.
It may very well be that the technology is not there yet or rather understood yet, some companies may try and execute this idea in the space, but come and go the way of Napster… Still I think once block chain makes its way into mainstream gaming it will be a huge game changer.
