Can Blockchain Cut Costs of Gaming?
There are all kinds of gamers in the world. From the casual gamer that plays a small handful of games once in a while to the avid gamer that streams themselves gaming from dawn to dusk (or dusk to dawn, I won't judge your schedule), they all have one thing in common. They would expand their gaming options if it just cost them less money! It seems all the most popular games follow one of two routes. They either have subscription fees, or they make it darn near impossible to play without buying extra goodies. This is because the gaming market is demanding something different. In the past, it worked good and well to sell a finished product of a game that could be played start to finish and then possibly played again. Now, people crave new content, new experiences, and updated features and quality from their games. This is the age of online gaming where the game never really ends and the developers are never really done. Unfortunately, this kind of online gaming is more expensive and is in desperate need of help from the blockchain. But how could blockchain help? It's all in the structure!
Source: Pixabay
Structural Restrictions Today
In my late high school and early college years, I used to play World of Warcraft, a MMORPG game that had a huge map to explore and regularly updated content and expansions. I still think of it as one of the greatest games I ever played extensively. Even as one of my favorite games, there were a couple things that I did not particularly enjoy. The thing that bothered me most of all was waiting in a queue to join the game, in it's younger days it was basically an expectation during any busy part of the day that you would have to wait to join. The queue wasn't just a couple minutes either, it was more of a sign in and then go do something else and come back in a while kind of queue. It was especially disheartening when you were in the middle of a raid (a group encounter consisting of 10, 25, or 40 players coordinating to achieve an objective) and had a small computer issue that exited the game and you had to log in again and explain to your raid group that you would be with them again in 30 minutes. In those days, you just had to accept that queues were part of the game as the only feasible way to run an extensive game like WoW was to have centralized servers that were managed by the game providers. This meant that as demand grew, sometimes the supply lagged behind and these queues popped up.
To this day, online games have required expensive servers and maintenance, and have been susceptible to scalability issues as the user-base expands. You likely aren't running into the same scenario I've described too much lately, but that's because now that these types of games have gained popularity producers have a better idea on projected hardware needs to stay ahead of the workload. That being said, it can still happen in the current paradigm, and trying to avoid it is costing these companies tons of money! But that's not the only structural issue that current game systems have. Security is also time consuming and expensive. This is because, with all data on a centralized server you cannot have the peer-to-peer ledger based security of the blockchain. The result is additional vulnerability to fraudulent interactions between users and even the creation of illegitimate items in some cases. Have you ever played a game and noticed the top 1000 scores on the leader-board should be unattainable? It's possible they have found security vulnerabilities in the game and cheated their way to the top.
Chimaera Solution
This is where Chimaera holds an advantage. Chimaera is a decentralized protocol that allows for what they refer to as "game channels" which enable users all around the world to store bits of global game data on their machines in place of a centralized server. You are likely familiar with the concept of storing data across a decentralized network as it is a driving force in the cryptocurrency space. This is what provides the next level of essential security in the growing online gaming community. This also offers additional perks such as ownership of items gathered in games and even ownership of your accounts, characters, and games. Chimaera even takes an extra step in blockchain efficiency with their protocol and allows for "side chains" to be created and agreed upon by subsets of the user base. This is far more efficient than other systems where all data is brought back to the main blockchain for verification. It also uses the concept of "Ephemeral timestamps" to resolve any disputes on game data to make sure that no fraudulent activities are taking place across the decentralized protocol and the "side chains" therein making sure everything is still secure. Since disputes being brought to the main blockchain this way would be less efficient, once they have been resolved the additional cost of the dispute can be paid by the incorrect player and the honest one can receive the game prize.
So, what does this all mean for the gaming community? It means for one that your games can be delivered to you at a discount due to the aforementioned efficiencies of the blockchain technology. Imagine a large MMORPG that has to pay to maintain their own servers. Now, imagine that same companies costs if they just didn't have to do that part of their job? They know they're competing with other games, so if their costs go down, it stands to reason that they will lower their fees for their games to attract more users! Another perk of this system is that it's simply more secure. If we can't come to an agreement on who owns what or who achieved what, we defer back to the "Ephemeral timestamps" concept outlined in the previous paragraph. This makes it so users can't find ways to hack in and create their own weapon with off the chart stats. This makes it so a free market exchange can't have it's terms changed at the last moment to screw over another user. This is truly secure gaming! These perks are currently only available through blockchain solutions, and Chimaera is set to become the standard in blockchain gaming. The pre-sale is still live for another 12 days, check out their website for more information!
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