The game market (software) is a billion-dollar business and have been for many years. In 2017, it was valued at 116billion U.S. dollars. What is important is that the first generation of gamers is now grown up with significant spending power; therefore, despite high penetration rates among kids, video games can no longer be considered solely a child’s play. In fact, it was found that video gaming is gaining on popularity among the seniors in the United States. Fun and mental agility are among the main reasons cited by the older gamers as to why they choose this pastime.
With the gaming industry continuing to grow in size and value, some companies are looking into building games around Blockchain to take advantage of cryptocurrencies, tokens, and their benefits
In recent years, games have entered the markets using Blockchain features such as wallets or tokens to secure and back in-game items. This way players have more ownership of the items or currency they loot and purchase. With a Blockchain record, players are guaranteed ownership which gives their items value to both the owner and other players.
From peer-to-peer competition, to real-money in game economies, to blockchain based in game assets, to decentralized game logic, there is a world of possibilities for how blockchain will be integrated into the next generation of video games and the products built around them.
EON: Game Distribution Platform
The EON Foundation, you can found it online at http://eontoken.io/, has been at the forefront of the minds of gaming-concerned cryptocurrency fans for quite some time now. The company has done significant work to popularize the concept of gaming on the blockchain, and a few of their most recent efforts have created quite the stir in an already-excited community of crypto gaming.
Most recently, the company released a statement regarding their interest in the creation of the EON Platform. The EON Platform is meant to tackle the most challenging problems in game distribution.
According to EON Whitepaper, https://docsend.com/view/yuhe5nc, there are several problems existing in the current method of game distribution which is potentially solved by blockchain technologies. They are:
Payments Issues
Some local distribution platforms only support local currencies (e.g., the largest Android distribution platform in China only supports RMB). So, when developers release a game targeting global users, they have to integrate the payment methods of local markets respectively. They usually have to find local partners or handle the local sales pricing, currency exchange by themselves. This greatly increase the cost of developers, and gamer from some countries have no chances to play those games.
Besides, all the centralized distribution platforms nowadays delay payments to developers for as long as 60 days and execute payments on specific days of a month. This makes it difficult from developers to manage their cash flow.Game Discovery and Promotion Issues
Another obstacle for developers is the increasing marketing cost. Developers are seeing the cost of new user acquisition growing from less than $1 to more than $12. In order to promote their games and allow players to discover their games, developers have to contribute their revenue to distribution platforms (30%+ of their revenue), and spend time and money in finding effective ad networks to reach targeted users.
The exposure rules on distribution platform is usually criticized for not being transparent (e.g., Apple’s editor driven app recommendation system is a blackbox). instead of designing for gamer, developers have to design games to meet the rules of distribution platform, so that they get higher chances to get more exposure and reach more users.
To find effective ads networks is another challenge. Most ads networks is not transparent and traceable, which means developers cannot calculate conversion rate and ROI (return on investment) of those networks. Even, some networks claim to reach real users for developers, but actually provide fake statistics and fake users.
There’re actually some new ways of marketing arising recently (e.g., influencer marketing). Influencer marketing is a new form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people rather than target market as a whole. But, the influencer marketing is also lack of transparency and cannot be easily tracked.
EON platform will be built on Ethereum (and in the future, the company also considering other advanced blockchain technologies) and uses cryptocurrency payments. Those technologies make developers can receive payments quickly, since transactions on blockchain is fast. They also don’t have to worry about integrating local payments or adjusting sales pricing, since the cryptocurrency system has handled it all.
EON will utilize smart contracts to track traffic across the platform. Since every user’s behavior is traceable on Ethereum, it will greatly reduce fake traffic and makes it easier to calculate conversion rate and ROI. EON platform also have incentive mechanisms to motivate gamers to broadcast the game they like in a decentralization way.
The final result is a win-win for developers and gamers. While developers earn more money by reducing marketing cost, gamers discover games more easily and can even earn money by supporting the game they like.
The EON Foundation is not alone in their work to create a new generation of games on the blockchain. Its investment partners, as well as an advising team including partners at Zynga gaming, Facebook, and the USC GamePipe Lab, are working closely with the company’s heads to further develop the technology.
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