Pay-To-Win
Before MOBAs, games that were free-to-play were also called pay-to-win. You could play the pay-to-win game for a little while for free, but eventually you'd hit a wall that could not be overcome without paying money to get past it. Good examples of pay-to-win games are Candy Crush Saga or literally any of those farming/building games you see on Facebook. Here is South Park's take on pay-to-win aka "Freemium".
History of MOBAs
Blizzard Entertainment created a little game called Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 wasn't that great. It felt more like a sad prequel to their most successful game: World of Warcraft. However, like their previous real time strategy games, Blizzard provided a very intricate map editor to let their fans create their own games based on the Warcraft 3 engine. It was with this map editor that DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) was born.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Ancients and my own memory:
Critical reception to DotA was positive, with it being called one of the most popular mods of any game.
DotA is largely attributed to being the most significant inspiration for the multiplayer online battle arena genre.
That's right! An entirely new genre of game was created with the Warcraft 3 map editor. Pretty crazy right? Not only that, MOBAs are the most popular competitive games that have viewership and fans. I have a friend that worked for Blizzard and he told me they tried to snipe the guys that made DOTA to work for them. They refused and made their own company called Riot. The MOBA that riot created, League of Legends, was a massive success.
From https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/06/more-people-watched-league-of-legends-than-the-nba-finals/
The New York Times reported earlier today that the Cavaliers' triumphant performance against the Warriors caught the attention of almost 31 million people.
It's the highest viewership for an NBA finals on the American ABC network in the last 18 years, and it's the highest for an NBA finals on ABC or ESPN in a decade. ESPN's online service, WatchESPN, also broke records with 1.76 million unique viewers.
But while that might be an all-time high for the NBA, it's still not as gargantuan as the crowd that tuned in for last year's League of Legends world finals.
Around 36 million unique viewers tuned in for last year's final between Koo Tigers and SK Telecom at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin, Germany, according to figures from Riot.
That's right! The NBA had record-breaking championship viewership and still fell short compared to the amount of people watching League of Legends. This truly is one sign of changing times, but why does it matter and what does it have to do with The Blockchain?
MOBAs revolutionized the free-to-play model.
League of Legends showed the world that it was possible to create a massively successful business model with a truly free-to-play game. In a pay-to-win game you get an actual in game tactical advantage for paying. With LOL and other MOBAs players pay for cosmetics, not in-game advantages.
The vast majority of money spent on MOBAs are skins. Changing a player's skin only alters the way the avatar's body and abilities look like; it doesn't change the game play at all. I have a friend that's personally spent over $1000 on LOL skins and he wants me to sell his account for him because he plays Blizzard's MOBA now, Heroes of the Storm.
Evolution of Gaming
Back in my day if you wanted to play a video game you had to buy it, or at least steal/pirate it. However, times are changing. The industry is evolving. We've seen pay-to-play, pay-to-win, and free-to-play games. The next step is paid-to-play games.
Paid-To-Play
This is where blockchain technology comes in. Never before have we had the opportunity to create decentralized games that actually pay people to play them. I believe the future of gaming is fully decentralized and open source, where people can earn money freely by playing games and even more so by helping to develop them. I have an idea lined up for such a marvel but it's so far off it's not even worth talking about yet. For now I'm simply going to focus on the business model of paid-to-play and my ideas for apps that I can accomplish solo in a relatively short span of time. More on this later. Steem on Steemians!