The gaming industry is blooming and turning into a lucrative business. Gamers, who were once a secluded club for chosen ones, have now blossomed into an impressive community with 2.3 billion people worldwide, and are expected to generate a market with an astonishing $108 billion revenue in 2017.
The gaming world is vast with thousands of fantasy worlds and alternative universes, and new ones being developed every month; but, the primary player base – about 1.4 billion – is concentrated around the top-10 most popular multiplayer competitive games, or MOBAs. With such an extensive pool of active participants, the gaming world quickly grew from a closed community for IT specialists into a large subculture with its own rules, superstars, and even economy. Now that economy is entering the big world with the help of services allowing trading or betting in-game assets for real money.
However, this rapidly growing community is strained by the current situation of relations among gaming platforms. Out of ten most popular games selected by total hours spent in the game, only four belong to Valve, four belong to Blizzard, and the two remaining were released by individual publishers. The situation is even more complicated in other cases by world-famous publishers. For example, you can purchase Dead Space I and II on Steam; but, for the third part, you have to install another gaming client, Origin.
Crypto Solution for Gamers’ Problems
The need for a unified platform where gamers could transfer, sell, and exchange their in-game assets from different franchises has been growing for a long time now. As an answer to this request, a successful individual game merchant and a passionate gamer himself, Volodymyr Panchenko, saw the perfect timing for creating DMarket.
DMarket is a unified marketplace based on blockchain and smart contracts, with one of its main aims to make the world of gaming more economically friendly for ordinary users. Monthly salary of professional gamers amounts to $10,000, and favorite skins (in-game cosmetics that only change the appearance of your weapon or character without giving any tactical advantage) sometimes sell for thousands of dollars. But this luxury is far away from 94% of the gaming community. As Volodymyr Panchenko notes, only 6% of 2.3 billion-member community can turn their in-game earnings into real assets. This restrains a mega-profitable market, which is estimated to bring around $450 billion to the world economy in the upcoming years.
Why Blockchain: A Guarantee of Safety and Transparency
A unified market for all the existing gaming platforms, publishers, and indie developers is an ambitious plan, and Volodymyr Panchenko believes that blockchain will make it easier to achieve. The involvement of third parties in any process regarding trade and exchange, and the disconnection of major publishing studios, creates a background for fraud and deceit.
Blockchain and smart contract technologies integrated into DMarket offer an elegant solution to both problems. Each item will receive a secure informational record considering all manipulations and transactions ever conducted with it. Due to the blockchain, every item will have a “signature” of each person who possessed it, without any possibility of wiping it.
Smart contracts, in turn, will minimize the influence of the human effect of the transactions, making them safer and more accurate. On DMarket, trades and exchanges will be conducted without an intermediary. When the trade offer is created, compulsory rules are inscribed into it. Only after the two parties have sent their assets and money is contract considered valid, and the exchange happens.
How Does This Benefit Developers?
While the profit for gamers is apparent, it may appear that DMarket will spike the already heated competition by becoming an additional player in the game of major publishers. However, cooperating with DMarket will bring profit for most publishing studios by adding “real-life” value to their virtual items. By providing a ready-to-use API, the service creates an opportunity for publishers to integrate themselves into a broader ecosystem, monetize their assets and bringing older games back to life. The project is also promised to have a custom engine support.
But this is only the beginning. When the project airs, DMarket will bring value to in-game items of different publishers by:
- Increasing the number of interested gamers, attracting more audience, and re-engaging those who have lost interest in playing
- Raising revenues of publishers by additional fees from every item exchange conducted on the platform
- Reigniting passion for older games and encouraging users to spend more time in-game while hunting for items to trade them later
- Bounty programs and development strategies for publishers
It’s in DMarket’s interest that the gaming world will bloom with new names coming out and taking the industry by storm; that is why the service offers bounty programs. Up to 18% of the funds gathered during ICO will be allocated to motivate publishers and developers for cooperation and making more items tradable via DMarket.
DMarket is a globally decentralized trading platform for in-game items that will provide developers additional revenue and increased interest in their products, help gamers monetize their skill and time spent in virtual reality, and alter the gaming economy by promoting transparency and the security of every deal.
To stay in touch with this project, follow DMarket on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, visit its topic on Bitcointalk.
