How Blockchain Is Changing The Rules Of The Game

The “Tokens and Blockchain in Gaming” panel at the Crypto Invest Summit held in Los Angeles exposed the audience to one of the blockchain’s most creative areas–gaming.

From April 30th to May 2nd, Los Angeles hosted the Crypto Invest Summit. An event aimed at blockchain investment. One of the most awaited panels held on the last day of the summit was called “Tokens and Blockchain in Gaming” and it focused on the increasing influence of the blockchain on gaming.  The speakers included important industry players Dirk Meyer of Egretia , Jonathan Swerdlow of Game Protocol, Lee Jacobson of RobotCache, Dave Anthony Call of Duty, Malcolm CasSelle of WAX.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are both having a significant impact on the gaming sector, which is expected to become a $143 billion global industry by 2020. That is why it can be said that the gaming industry is one of the fastest growing tech industries in the world.

Games involve money. Some of them allow the gamer to buy digital gold, although that is still too time-consuming. For this reason, gamers use real money to buy in-game assets. This is one of the sources of the gaming industry ’s huge revenues.

Just like in the world of finance where investors require a safe environment to carry out their transactions, gamers require a safe platform to develop their own games. They must be able to trade, sell and buy securely. The blockchain allows them to sell their profile to others on a secure platform if they want. They can also take their profile with them into a new game. There have been experiences in incorporating the blockchain on games. For example, Beyond the Void, a space strategy game was built on the Ethereum blockchain.  Imagine playing Call of Duty in a Grand Theft Auto map using World of Warcraft weapons. This is what will be possible when everything goes onto the blockchain.

The most interesting intervention of the panel that created more buzz in the room was the one by Gamytech’s CEO Jonathan Swerdlow. Swerdlow is uniquely qualified to talk about the transformation that the blockchain is bringing to the gaming industry.

GamyTech is a video game studio that was founded in 2011. By  2015, it was making US$91.5 billion worldwide; more than double the revenue of the international film industry.

Around the same time, the CEO of GamyTech Jonathan Swerdlow saw the surge of the blockchain technology and in 2017 he decided to create within GamyTech, Game Protocol, a kind of crowdfunding platform meant to help multiplayer game creators realize and distribute their vision.

Game Protocol allows game creators to generate a webpage in the GameStarter website that explains their game to the crypto community. The community can then invest in the idea using Game Protocol Tokens which is the native token of the GameProtocol ecosystem. Investors receive, in exchange, better inApp tools that will help them play the completed game. A smart contract guarantees that the creating team will get paid once the game is developed.

At the end of the development process, GameProtocol will publish the finished game in its own game store where users can play it provided they pay for the access with Game Protocol Tokens. Games like special Guns and Soccer championship were developed this way.

Swerdlow said in Los Angeles “We are only starting and the potential of cryptocurrency technologies in games is practically untapped.”