I stumbled across Hive randomly and never was active on Steemit. I am really grateful I did and slowly Hive starts to feel like home to me. It may still be in it's infancy and while it still is rather small in terms of market capitalization, it already has a lot to show for itself. In my opinion, Hive is going to be one of (if not the) leading blockchain in terms of Blockchain Gaming. Today I'm going to present you the top 5 reasons that make me believe so and as a bonus, give you a short introduction to some of the games you might want to take a look at.
1) Ease of transaction
If you were to name just one reason why Blockchain Gaming is the future it's probably going to be true ownership of your ingame assets. All successful blockchain games always revolve around their players being able to actually own and trade all of their ingame assets when every they want to to whomever they want to. As easy as it sounds, as complicated it often is in reality. Just take a look at Gods Unchained. One of the most promising trading card games in the crypto world, running on ETH. All cards you own in the game are NFTs and can be freely traded through various marketplaces around the web. So let's just say I want to buy myself a random common card for 0.0002 ETH:
The card itself is worth only 0.05$ but to buy it I would have to pay a Gas Fee of 3.99$ - that's absurd and nobody will to that! So while I managed to do quite some trades in the game when Gas Fees were low, right now, nobody is trading anything other than the most valuable cards. With prices like these, owning your cards is all but meaningless because you won't be able to ever do a single trade.
With Hive, there's no Gas Fee at all. Most marketplaces will ask for a small fee for your transaction. Usually, that amounts to 5% of the Hive spent, but you'll never be in a situation where you'd have 80 times the value of your purchase in fees. Also, transactions are almost done instantly on Hive. No more waiting for minutes (or hours) until your transaction is finally processed. That point alone is making Hive a far superior choice compared to many competing blockchains.
2) Transparency
It might sound counter intuitive at first (and it surely is not what a lot of blockchain enthusiasts are used to), but it's a great boon to blockchain gaming in my opinion. If you know my Hive name, you can check almost anything about me with different tools. Take a look at hiveblocks and you can see how much Hive I hold, what I'm trading and where my transactions are going to or coming from. Check peakd and you can even see what my collections in different games are worth. Not only that, you can check exactly what cards I own in what quantity.
This transparency goes a long way in preventing people from being scammed. There's no claiming to own assets you don't, no impersonating somebody you are not. You can check the account of any member at any time. That makes trading with each other so much less stressful. Personally, I have traded assets worth several hundred dollars in eXode alone without the need of a 3rd party or a marketplace. By simply checking that my trading partner is who he claims to be and he actually owns the assets he claims to have, I can avoid being scammed almost altogether.
Having that level or transparency really helps to build trust within the community. That's not to say that there won't be people trying to scam you whenever they can, but they'll have quite a harder time doing so if you use the tools available to you. If you check some of the game's discord channels, you'll often find people just transferring assets to each other without hesitation or waiting for the other side to send as well.
3) Ease of Token Exchange
This point is obviously linked to my first one, but it deserves a separate mention! Hive-Engine has established itself as the de facto standard for token trading in the Hive ecosystem. All major dapps running on the Hive Blockchain allow you to withdraw their token to Hive-Engine. In the classical ask/bid style you can exchange any token for Hive or to buy another token with that Hive. There's zero fee for these exchanges and they do happen instantly. Once more, try doing that for one of the many ETH tokens.
This actually makes playing different games on the Hive blockchain a lot more interesting. If I find a gold foil card in Splinterlands I can easily sell that card, transfer my earning to Hive-Engine and use the Hive I made to buy a Contract in eXode. And once I find that I don't want to have that contract anymore, I can just sell it again, return the funds back and use them to buy some more buildings in dcity.
This is a very important fact for one of blockchain gaming's most important promises: If you quit playing a game, you'll still have something to show for. It won't get much easier to cash out a game than it's on Hive. But even if you don't intend to quit any of your games, being able to freely move funds between the different games makes it so much easier to make the right investment in the right game at the right moment.
4) It's easy to earn some Hive if you invest some time and effort
This one might be more important than you'd think. If you are new to the blockchain world acquiring that first crypto is going to be tough. You either shell out some real money to just buy it our you waste your time on faucets for no to minimal gains. Nobody is out there just waiting to hand you some free Crypto and that's no different for Hive. But still, if you put in some time (and preferably some brain as well) you totally can make some Hive every day just by writing articles over at hive.blog.
I know, it's tough in the beginning, I've been there as well... or maybe I'm even still there, who really knows? But if you pick a game you like and deliver quality content, you will get upvotes and you will earn Hive every day. Now obviously just working a real job and using some of that money to buy the Hive you need would be a lot faster, but that's not the point here. There are a lot of players out there coming from a free-2-play or, like the crypto world loves to call it, a play-2-earn background. While many paying players frown upon them they are still pretty important to the success of a game. Every market needs sellers as much as it needs buyers. So free 2 play players are just as important in offering cheap tokens/NFTs as the paying players are in buying them.
The unique earning concept of Hive allows these players to earn some additional Hive to boost their earnings, it helps them to buy stuff they want in the games they play, and it even helps to create more traffic around these games. Ultimately it's one of these situations where everybody wins and it's something that only the Hive blockchain can offer right now.
5) There are a lot of promising games already on their way
This might come as a surprise, but I'm not the first genius to figure it all out. Quite some promising games are already being made on Hive as you are reading this. I'm quite sure we'll see a lot more titles in the coming years, but I'm really happy with what we already have. So to give you some ideas what games you might want to try, here are the most interesting titles on Hive (according to me). I don't want to bloat the article too much, so I'll have a short paragraph each with a Link to the game.
For now, Splinterlands is Hive's top title without any doubt. Going strong for two years now, it's a collectible card auto battler with one of the strongest ingame economy any bloackchain game has to offer. The game is fast paced and easy to get into. It's not free to play though and requires an initial investment of 10$. I'd still highly encourage anybody to give it a shot, you'll quite likely make your money back and then some, all while having quite some fun playing it. If you want to make the most out of the 10$ investment, I'd advise you to use constanza's reflink over on publish0x to join the game. The additional cards will help immensely to get you started.
eXode has to be the most ambitious game on Hive or maybe even any blockchain. With a scope well beyond anything we've seen so far in blockchain gaming, it's probably going to take years to get everything running, but I can't wait to be part of that journey. eXode is a decision making game made up of a fast paced Evacuation and more laid back Colonization stage. The game is strongly focused on tradable cards that can enhance your playthrough in many ways. Right now the game is in Early Alpha stage with a playable version of Evacuation already available. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the game and if you are interested to learn more, you'll find a lot of articles on the game in my blog on publish0x or check 
Rising Star is an idle game at heart but one that comes with a lot of charm. The game puts you in the shoes of an aspiring musician that's dreaming of becoming the next big show some day. You start the game with nothing but your guitar and a desire to become famous. Since stardom (usually) doesn't happen overnight, you have to slowly earn it with some first baby steps. Illegally perform in the streets until the cops drive you away or go to the open mic night and give it your best. Once you've gained some fans you start to give a radio interview or perform in the local shopping mall. What's really special about the game is the Rising Star Radio, a built in music player that plays music from actual independent music artists. I've grown really fond of it and have it running most of the time no matter what I'm doing.
Another promising title just released into Alpha this week is Crypto Brewmaster. As the title suggests, the game revolves around brewing and drinking beer. What my sound like a gimmick is looking to become a complex and feature rich game. The game's art style has me hooked up already and I'm really looking forward to everything the developers might come up with in the coming months. As the game just released a couple of days ago, there's not much to do in the game yet, but it's always great to be with a game from the beginning. Since it's completely free to join, there's no harm in giving it a shot already. My most recent article gave some first impressions on the game in case you want to learn more.
Finally, dCity is a city management game were you can construct a vast array of different buildings to attract new citizens to your town, slowly creating a boom town including an aiport, a nuclear plant, and a complete military industrial complex. The game is not free to play and does need an initial investment to get anything done. Its very own Token SIM is one of the stronger and more stable tokens on Hive and there are reports of players who have made quite some money trading their buildings and citizens to each other. If you are willing to make that initial investment, dCity is an interesting alternative to consider.
Summing it all up, I firmly believe that Hive is one of the best chains available for blockchain gaming and if the stars align we might actually see it emerge as the number 1 blockchain for gaming in the future!
That's all from me today. Thank you all for reading and if you feel like, please share your opinion in the comments. See you all next time!