Gaming, in general, has become something of a pastime for a huge number of people all across the world. Different industries have intertwined themselves with the video gaming market making movie adaptations, book adaptations, etc. This has been boosted even further due to the novel coronavirus pandemic that has been rattling the world. With numerous countries under lockdown for months and active media encouragement to stay home and isolate the gaming industry has never been happier.
With the evolution of portable devices like smartphones and tablets, mobile gaming has become a new driver of the industry. While the games on smart devices are still considered to be extremely average at best the market is still there with lots of people proactively using their funds to gain benefits in-game. This is indirectly forced upon players by making the game unbearable due to all of the refillable energy bars, or lives, or other things that the gameplay is directly dependent upon. Without paying such instances are being rejuvenated by waiting and the waiting time can be huge. This is why the gaming industry as a whole saw a growth while people were and still are to an extent at home. Mobile gaming started generating huge income due to the fact that a lot of people are bored anyway and do not want to sit around and wait for days until they can play their mobile game again.
The market strategy for the mobile gaming industry is a free-to-play model with in-application purchases to augment the experience. A lot of games have become so reliant on these microtransactions that it is almost impossible to play without. Games like Raid: NFT, Shadow Legends, Call of Duty: Mobile, Pokemon GO, Fire Emblem Heroes, Garena Free Fire, and etc. all heavily rely on in-app purchases. With recent statistics, mobile gaming in the year 2019 made as much as $60 billion from the userbase. This is a growth of almost 13% from the previous year. It is also worth mentioning that 68% of iOS’s total revenue for the year was from mobile gaming accounts. This number grows even higher when we look at the Android market sitting at 84%.
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency in Mobile Gaming
With the development of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency has become a new addition to the financial market. A lot of gaming companies especially after appearance of innovative NFT projects have taken an interest in developing in-app transactions using cryptocurrencies. With companies like Valve integrating bitcoin transactions into their gigantic digital video gaming store Steam. Although the idea was scrapped in late 2017 due to concerns associated with cryptos like volatility. Although blockchain offers a lot of quality-of-life improvements that the international banking system just do not it is still a newborn digitalized financial transaction record-keeping system that needs a lot of safeguards to keep the required level of financial security of the customers.
Due to Valve’s experience, Cryptocurrencies in video gaming are still under a lot of scrutiny. This does not mean, however, that there is no room for implementation. The mobile gaming market can be the one that can thrive on such ordeals. This can be made even easier due to the fact that a lot of people keep their electronic wallets on their smartphones and a lot of users even trade through their mobile devices. This means that the cryptocurrency can be utilized to substitute for some of these microtransactions. This is in the face with another controversy going on in recent years connected with loot boxes, which are classified as gambling by many regulator commissions all across the world. There can be a separate argument made for the blockchain’s impact on loot boxes but this goes beyond the scope of this article and is better discussed in our other blog post.
Advantages of Utilizing Cryptocurrencies
There are a number of advantages to utilized cryptocurrencies like such payment methods make the games available to the worldwide market. This is due to the simple fact that cryptocurrency exchanges are borderless meaning that anyone from anywhere can participate. The value of the crypto on the exchange is also not tied to the regions and thus is universal across the globe. The amount of cryptocurrency is always dependant on the user and their ability to trade not where they are stationed.
Cryptocurrencies also offer a beautiful way to eliminate a lot of intermediary companies. Traditional international transactions have to go through private banks. This process is associated with a lot of time, energy, and fees that need to be paid. Cryptocurrencies allow users to transact money directly to each other. This, in term, will cause a more hassle-free payment process and will indirectly encourage the users to buy more products.
Overal, the cryptocurrency and NFTs are still in their infancy and has a lot to work on and develop better. However, the way it seems right now, it is a financial system of the future. With all of the central governments trying to come up with their own digital currencies like United States Dollar Tether (USDT) or latest China’s Digital Yuan, or Japan’s Digital Yen. However, the difference between these and other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that the latter are decentralized not connected to any of the governments and thus have nothing to fear from these central institutions that would like to tamper with it and affect the outcome of the market. It is the “wild west” of financial systems and the implementation of such a system is bound to bring success.
