[Photo: Gamers at a past e-Sports competition Source: wikipedia.org]
The virtual gaming industry is projected to be valued at over $128 Billion, in terms of revenue, by 2020. This means that the time is ripe for buying and selling digital assets found in these virtual games using blockchain technology and via tokens. Any virtual asset can now be bought and traded using the various decentralized platforms available. This makes life easier for games in that you can now easily maneuver your way through the various gamers if you have a bunch of tokens to get you through.
It can also be a smarter way of enticing gamers since some of these tokens can be used to reward players or hire them in a team environment.
The trading platforms can also become marketplaces for the said digital assets where one can decide to be solely a trader of these items.
So which decentralized gaming tokens are out there and what do they do?
The list is huge and keeps growing with each ICO being offered daily. But let me highlight 4 that look like changing the gaming industry.
DMarket (DMT)
DMarket is a global marketplace solution that turns every virtual item into a real commodity. DMarket is a new ecosystem where gamers, developers, and entrepreneurs can meet to exchange all the items found in the various games. For example; a new armor, a fancy car, new rims for the said car, all the various weapons needed in gaming combat…just to name a few.
DMarket’s white papers says they plan to fill the void that gaming has had by providing the said decentralized and global platform for all these digital assets. Their solution is meant to be cross-platform meaning gamers can trade any item from any game. The market will be regulated by actual demand where gamers can collect rare digital items and game developers can provide unique, relevant and tradable gaming content.
The platform is slated to be released by the end of Q1, 2018.
Enjin (ENJ)
In an earlier article I had explained that Enjin offers a decentralized platform to manage, distribute, and trade virtual goods. This gives gamers and content creators a new model of virtual ownership. This means that gamers can bring or trade their assets from game to game, community to community, growing their digital wallet with real value as they play.
It is an ERC-20 Token with the usual smart contract capability that gives game developers, content creators and gaming communities the required crypto-backed value and tools for implementing and managing virtual goods.
Enjin currently partnered with Minecraft. This means that game players and content creators can trade skins, textures, worlds, maps, wizards…just to name a few. This is very much revolutionary and profitable given that Minecraft has over 50 Million users.
DreamTeam (DTT)
DreamTeam is unique in that it caters for e-sports. This includes all the sport related virtual games of NFL, NHL, NBA, and Soccer. DreamTeam pretty much gives you a blochchain backed platform where you can recruit gamers of these games, manage them in a team environment and reward them for their gaming skills using DTT Tokens.
This means that if you are a good e-Sports player, you can be hired and paid using the DreamTeam platform. Gaming can now be considered as a career alternative to being an engineer, doctor or a university professor. All that time spent playing Madden or Fifa will finally pay off for the thousands of gamers who are true fans of e-Sports.
On the other side, if you are a sports team like my Philadelphia Eagles, you can use DreamTeam to recruit and reward gamers to represent the team the same you recruit actual players getting in on the action on the field.
UnkoinGold (UKG)
UnkionGold is unique because it caters for the eSport gamblers out there. You can now place wagers on the various eSport games in tournaments using UnkoinGold’s platform that is about to be released. The ICO collected over 112,000 Ethereum coins and distributed over 127,000,000 tokens. They also raised a total of $10,000,000 from the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Guy O’Seary, Mark Cuban, Shari Redstone, Elisabeth Murdoch, 500 Startups, Tabcorp, Indicator Ventures and Hyperspeed Ventures.
This is an impressive list of Venture Capitalists backing the project. They too believe that the gaming industry needs a blockchain backed betting platform for the fans.
In summary, the virtual gaming industry can now be recognized as a reality of its own with all the capabilities of trading digital assets, getting paid as a gamer and also being able to place secure s-Sports bets on the blockchain. The rapid growth of the gaming industry makes it ripe for blockchain technology. These 4 platforms aim at tackling that.
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