Chat: Digital Assets in Virtual Worlds

[Jayed]

Hope I'm doing this right. Not certain if Bob wants us to stick to his premises or if he wants us to help him conceive of new opportunities as well.. but here's what I've got this morning. The premise is simple, I'd like to discuss how digital assets should approach capturing the attention of the video game industry. Which some may know has grown to become the largest entertainment industry last year. With projected growth rates for the coming decade expected to grow 20%, as the dawn of Augmented and Virtual Reality systems entering the greater market place, being on the back of many gamer's minds.

To date, several blockchain dapp games have launched, most infamously cryptokitties. However none of these games have captured any kind of meaningful presence within the games industry. Primarily these games are played by gamers already within the blockchain community. Thus, I see the problem as our industry being a stereotypical self-absorbed adolescent market. It thinks because it knows markets, it knows games. But the two are very different creatures. One is mechanical and largely inhumane in nature while the other is organic, expressive and innately human in nature. Thus my belief is blockchain companies will begin working with game studios to create virtual economies within video games that run on/connect to the greater blockchain ecosystem. Both parties would benefit. Game developers are HORRIBLE at creating functioning market places. So if a blockchain company can provide the virtual framework for video game companies. Allowing them to provide liquidity to their virtual economies, it would save on internal production costs for said framework by the game developer. Allowing their efforts to be directed towards assuring quality in other important game features.

In essence what I'm proposing is this. I'd like to discuss is how we can push games industries to integrate blockchain into some of the world's largest economies, that to date are simply non-liquid, thus worth nothing, despite all it's potential value. Consider what separates an MMO account that sells on Ebay worth the cost of the game itself, vs an account that sells for $3,000 dollars. The account is not what's of value. Rather the items/in-game value is what is being derived. For 20 years trillions of hours have been dumped into MMOs, all creating exorbitant amounts of value for their community members. But due to being disconnected from the greater marketplace are all but frozen to the outside world. Obviously with hundreds, if not thousands, of different "gold farming" companies monopolizing on collecting video game money, it's clear these assets already carry real world value. However due to a lack of integration between real world currencies and virtual currencies, these massive market places of untapped assets continue to lay dormant within their respective bubbles.

So there's an obvious use cases for blockchain in upcoming video game market places, the issue is they're just not aware of the value that a blockchain could unlock for their games and the communities that spawn from them. This is where I get to the point of how I think blockchain breaks into the video game industry. We, as holders and promoters of blockchain tech are in the driver seat for promoting interoperability between our favorite blockchains and upcoming game titles. Ideally we would want to collectively begin targeting early development video games that promote having in-game market places. As well as target game developers who regularly produce titles incorporating in-game market places. Being the XRP puritan that I've become over the last year, I obviously want to work towards pushing game developers to utilize Ripple systems for accessing the greater blockchain. And seeing as this is a Bob (XRP) centric community, I'd like to engage with the most driven in our community to help me begin a campaign to help me organize a community(consumer) driven push to transform video games industry from a pay to play industry into a pay for play industry.

Anyways, this is obviously a "Chat" so please feel free to share your views on the topic of digital assets in virtual worlds. Do you see the same untapped opportunities for partnerships I do? Maybe you do, but you see something more, something different. What ever your view on the topic share! As I said earlier, I see crypto as a self-absorbed adolescent. So I'm hoping to broaden our view of the future of blockchain, beyond just real world financial payment channels. I want to be able to engage with a think-tank of like minded people in visualizing market-by-market integration of blockchain technologies, with the purpose of creating new means for people to create/exchange value that were either unfeasible or non-profitable prior to the advent of ILP systems.

[BobWay]

You did a great thing!  What an awesome topic!

I would really like to have more discussion of how XRP and the XRP Ledger can be used right now.  Gaming is an awesome thing to consider since "digital assets" can include tradable/sellable in-game assets as well as simple pay for play transactions.

I'm a bit busy today to give this post the attention it needs today. But I will tomorrow.

I hope everyone else starts this discussion so that I can catch up.

[gamblin310]

Ripple is working on this with Forte. 

http://fortune.com/2019/03/12/ripple-forte-blockchain-games/

https://forte.io/

[Jayed]

@BobWay my thoughts exactly! I can't tell you how many games I've played, that looking back in hindsight could have been monumental successes, had they implemented a blockchain framework to enable players to exchange the perceived value of their virtual possessions via digital assets. Moreover, it would solve a major inherent issue most game publishers have. By which I mean, like traditional financial institutions, game devs/publishers are both judge and jury of their ecosystems, despite they themselves not representing the majority of users of said ecosystem. This unrestricted power over the ecosystem by a select few results in massive swings in the ecosystem's user's perception of the marketplace they're involved in. So not only could blockchain enable video game consumers to extract value from what they are doing for "entertainment," but it would also help in introducing more stable ecosystems that devs/publishers won't be as easily capable of accidentally driving their game's economy off a cliff.

@Gamblin310 Yeah, I'm aware of Forte and it was among the projects I was thinking of when I referred to current blockchain ventures into the video game industry as "self-absorbed adolescents." To be clear, I'm sure Forte has a brilliant strategy for penetrating the market. However, their website/outreach thus far screams that they don't actually understand gamer culture much better than Ripple. Which not saying there aren't people working at Ripple who play video games, but I am saying there probably aren't many people at Ripple who would DEFINE themselves as gamers. As an outside I see Forte as possessing similarly minded talent. Their team is likely comprised predominantly of blockchain enthusiasts, not video game enthusiasts. Will they hire game enthusiasts to develop their game? Maybe.

I personally see myself as a gamer/game enthusiast. Despite not gaming nearly as much now a days as I did in my youth. But having spent nearly two decades observing the gaming market as both a wannabe game developer and a 'life-long gamer' I can say two things with near certainty. First, Publishers/marketing teams are typically run by non-gamers, people that gamers see as 'the idiots in charge of ruining the game.' Second, indie games are both the present and future of the game's industry. Again, I see this as being due to publishers being governed as business centric entities, as opposed to being governed by an enthusiastic gamer centric model. Thus they have become systemically less relevant in the rapidly transforming gaming market place. A market where gamers are ever more hungry for something "new" now that the market has spent over 20 years shoving the same recycled franchises at players. I'm making this claim based upon the trend that's unfolded in the games industry where despite established franchises still growing year over year, indie games are becoming an ever larger portion of the gaming market place as a whole in regards to purchased/sold units.

So while I'd love to see Forte prove my fears wrong, I personally feel there's a pretty strong historical precedent for my concerns. Especially considering the first thing I see on Forte's website is this sentence, "Forte is accelerating the adoption of blockchain technology in the games industry by equipping developers with easy-to-use technology and tools that lay a new foundation for player-driven game economies, better aligning incentives between players and publishers." Hey that's a great sentence for a blockchain company, looking to attract the support of other blockchain companies. But you know who that sentence doesn't appeal to? The 12-15 year old kids who dictate the "flavor of the month" video game that's "selling more copies in the first week than..." Incidentally... the fact that the gaming market is primarily composed of teenagers is the other reason I'd like to encourage further discussions on this topic within our community! I'm assuming everyone here is like myself and ultimately wants to see the blockchain marketplace flourish. So any criticisms I've made are simply my desire to point out potential pitfalls that the space needs to do it's best to avoid.

Edited April 17, 2019 by Jayed