The commercialization of gaming in the 1950s opened up the world to new innovations, kicking off the journey to becoming the most popular and profitable sector in the entertainment industry. The explosive growth of smartphones over the past two decades has further caused the exponential growth of the industry with over half of the global population today playing games either on their consoles, computers, or mobile phone.
According to Statista, over 3.5 billion people played games over the past year, with 70%+ of them aged 18 years or older. These games generated over $56.8 billion in estimated revenue in North America, the world’s largest gaming market, in 2021, with the figure expected to grow to over $80 billion by 2025. Notwithstanding, the gaming market is expected to grow by a massive 11.5% CAGR in the next seven years, showing massive potential in the gaming industry.
The potential, however, could be hindered by a lack of innovation and persistent challenges in the traditional model of gaming. To this end, developers and gamers alike have started moving towards blockchain-based technologies, to bring back the fun days of gaming!
The Rise of Blockchain Gaming Solutions
At the height of the 2017 crypto boom, the first-ever blockchain game, CryptoKitties was launched. Since then, it has been a race to build better and more innovative games, with 2020 proving to be the “unlocking moment” for the blockchain gaming industry.
According to a Q1 2022 report from Dappradar and Blockchain Game Alliance, the blockchain gaming market grew over 2000%, with games and metaverse projects surpassing a market value of $2.5 billion since Q1 2021. Additionally, several corporations and businesses have shown support for the growing ‘metaverse’ including Meta, Google, and Microsoft, and an $8 trillion market cap could be on the cards for the Metaverse at the end of the decade, according to a Morgan Stanley report.
With younger generations more emersed in the gaming and crypto ecosystem and the blockchain gaming developers building more innovative and interactive games, experts believe this could be the future of gaming.
How Blockchain Gaming Improves Gamers’ Experience
Akin to other areas in that blockchain has been used, blockchain gaming introduces new innovations in the gaming ecosystem. The collision between the world of blockchain and gaming has created new opportunities for the gaming community. Blockchain introduces major advantages for the gaming ecosystem including rewarding gamers via play-to-earn (P2E) models, introducing NFT capabilities within the games and interoperability of assets across games.
League of Kingdoms, one of the most popular blockchain games offers these features to its gaming community, recently adding NFT capabilities. The game is a massively multiplayer (MMO) strategy game that is centred around building kingdoms and governing the world. Here the player can build a powerful kingdom and army, forge alliances, compete against others, and trade digital assets across the blockchain.
Gamers on LoK play and compete against each other to earn rewards that can be redeemed for real money on secondary markets. In traditional gaming, gamers would spend hours playing games with no possibility of earning or at times they even needed to pay more to play the game. However, the advent of blockchain gaming changed the whole dynamic, allowing gamers to monetize their time and skills while playing the game.
Secondly, blockchain gaming introduces the concept of non-fungible tokens to represent their in-game assets. NFTs are transparently and verifiably stored on the blockchain network. On LoK, the LAND parcels gamers collect are represented in NFTs, so gamers can own and trade them freely for real cash. Gamers can not only own a parcel of Land, but various resources therein, and the future growth of the game platform.
Recently, League of Kingdoms announced its flagship game, League of Kingdoms Arena (LoKA) will add Drago NFTs, to implement an engaging play-to-earn mechanic for its gamers, in an effort to bootstrap the in-game economy of the popular game. Expected to launch at the end of May, these NFTs will allow gamers to breed the Genesis batch to create new NFTs, which can be used to improve your battle character within the game.
Finally, blockchain gaming also allows gamers to use their assets across other games. Imagine the game you are playing suddenly stops working or you finish the levels, what will you do with all the assets collected? With blockchain, your item remains usable across other games because it can be transferred from one blockchain to another in the metaverse. It is still yours to keep and possibly utilise in a new game. It is possible to keep it in your cryptocurrency wallet. This is all possible due to NFTs being transferable across platforms.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the rise of the gaming ecosystem is set to continue to explode in the future. Blockchain gaming introduces new innovations and rewards that could grow the gaming ecosystem to a trillion-dollar market in the next decade.