By Diego Orenstein – attorney and VP of Legal at BBL
With the advent of blockchain technology in the cryptocurrency landscape, it was only a matter of time before video games began to emerge in this niche. In practice, there are already several electronic games on the market that use blockchain systems or some other “pay to win” mechanism.
How does a game with blockchain technology work in practice?
The basic premise is the following: either the game is free to play (free-to-play), or a kind of entry payment is required from the player, usually in cryptocurrency. During gameplay, the player can earn in-game assets in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFT). In case you still don’t know what an NFT is, it’s basically a unique and exclusive asset, like a work of art, only in a digital form.
Specifically in games, NFTs tend to be in-game items, such as weapons, cosmetic skins (costumes and clothing, for example) or other collectibles.
In view of the above premises, how does this NFT system differ from the traditional system already known to everyone who plays some type of video game, that is, to earn items in the normal course of the game or through microtransactions with in-game currency? The difference is precisely in the blockchain system: due to the fact that such assets are stored on a public blockchain, the player becomes the only “owner” of the items acquired within the game.
That way, if something happens to the game server or if its developer, for whatever reason, decides to disable it, the item purchased by the player will still exist on the public blockchain. This somehow preserves some real value on the item (NFT), while there is still demand for that item, of course. Furthermore, blockchain technology allows for the “interchangeability” of items between different games, even from different developers, as long as those games allow such interchangeability within their source code. For example, it would be like purchasing a Fortnite skin (from Epic) and using it in an online game of Call of Duty – Warzone, (from Activision – now Microsoft).
Some popular blockchain-based titles already exist in the gaming market, such as the game “Axie Infinity”, which has a wide base of passionate players, some of them even profiting heavily from the sale of NFTs in the form of collectibles purchased on the Internet. match. This formula makes the game even more attractive in terms of experience, since players have the possibility of receiving some financial return for the time invested in the game.
A deficiency that can be seen in blockchain-based games is that they are still conceived under the marketing strategy of carrying out transactions after the game has been acquired, harming, in a way, the experience that the player intended to have when he paid for the title and bringing that old debate about micro transactions: “if I already paid for the game, why do I have to spend more money in the game to have fun?” Along these lines, NFTs are already seen by some critics as “tricks” to boost sales of a game, making it more attractive. The problem is that absolutely anything can be turned into NFT and any NFT can easily turn into something with little or no real value.
There is still the fact that many blockchain-based games have the characteristics of “freemium” or “pay to win” games, in which the player has to spend real money in the expectation of gaining some competitive advantage. With this in mind, Valve, for example, has already banned blockchain games from Steam (the largest online game store), probably because of this concern.
In fact, blockchain games are already viewed with some trepidation by the gamer community, especially after a developer sold a series of NFTs before the launch of its game to capitalize on the operation, and soon after it simply disappeared from the map. On the other hand, some important players in the games industry signal that blockchain-based games will play a significant role in the future of games, such as Ubisoft and EA, the latter with its CEO openly declaring that collectible digital content will be a considerable part of the game. publisher’s strategy in the future.
From a consumer point of view, blockchain technology could have an impact on the price of games, either to reduce costs or to increase them. We explain: while on the one hand it is possible to develop cheaper games by transferring certain tasks to servers within the public blockchain instead of using their own servers, on the other hand there may be an increase in the value of items or characters within a game that are needed for the player to become competitive.
For example, in the case of the Axie Infinity game mentioned above, the player needs to spend about a thousand dollars to buy a reasonably competitive team within the game. On the other hand, there are blockchain-based games and initiatives that focus more on the collector aspect than the pay-to-win mechanics, such as the Supdrive title, which offers retro-style games, where the games themselves are the NFTs, each which having its own arts, colors and difficulty, making it unique.
In other words, the concept of blockchain in the gaming world is still in an embryonic stage and should improve over time, so that its impacts are more beneficial than negative for games and players in general, provided that, of course, we don’t have to spend fortunes on NFTs to have fun with the games we love.
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