Making our first steps in 2020 requires us to look ahead and try to establish what are the things to look forward to in this new decade? And since all the major discoveries in recent years had a strong connection with technology, it’s fair to assume that’s the domain that will bring us the most innovation. One particular area seems to be of interest to people around the world right now: the connection between crypto and the gaming industry. As you already know, crypto seems to be the buzz word nowadays and since it can have interesting applications in a lot of industries, gaming isn’t excluded. Let’s look at a few of the trends we could see in recent years.
Microtransactions and Crypto
As you already know, the trend of microtransactions doesn’t look like going anywhere in 2020. Developers that managed to get it right and not annoy users, made great use of microtransactions to round their income. However, no matter how trusted and safe a platform may be, there’s always the step of convincing a player to get up, take the wallet and insert their details to make a payment for a skin/upgrade or an expansion pack. If cryptocurrencies would be integrated in the microtransactions system, it would allow instant transactions with full transparency. And this comes to aid both the developers and players since the payment process would be smoother and a lot safer.
The idea is not that futuristic, actually. Back in 2017, Steam and Twitch integrated cryptocurrencies on their platforms. However, due to the volatility of the biggest crypto out there, they were forced to let the idea go. However, taking into consideration that the entire crypto industry seems to head towards a much more stable period, it could be the beginning of a wonderful partnership.
Blockchain Technology to Improve Everything About Gaming
Even if cryptocurrencies are yet to instable to be fully integrated to gaming platforms to serve as reliable payment options for microtransactions, the technology behind the biggest cryptocurrencies is already used to help the gaming industry. You probably already hinted this from the title, we are talking about blockchain.
Not only that blockchain can help developers to create better games and increase collaboration in a safe and transparent environment. The increased speed of blockchain software makes the actual building process, as well as testing, a lot easier. On the other hand, blockchain can be a lot of help to players as well since they would be able to store their unique items more securely. Since the centralized game servers are often targeted by hackers, being able to keep your items in a blockchain-powered wallet that can’t be accessed by anyone else, no matter what technology they possess.
Bitcoin Casinos
Since online casinos are also part of the gaming industry, no matter if some are not pleased by this classification, when talking about crypto and gaming, we can’t leave them out. Actually, it’s here that most progress have been made, with online casinos accepting cryptocurrency payments for quite some time now. The notion of a bitcoin casino, even though pretty shaky at first, has evolved into the equivalent in instant payments, transparency, and trust thanks to blockchain technology. Casino players using bitcoin can make anonymous transactions without putting their personal information at risk and the speed with which the transactions are processed ( both for deposits and withdrawals) can’t be matched by any of the standard payment options right now.
Of course, nobody can accurately predict what the future will bring in terms of cryptocurrency, gaming and the way these two work together. However, the signs of cashless payments being more and more popular across the globe plus the big corporations using blockchain-powered systems are very good. We are looking forward to seeing how these two domains will join forces to deliver unbelievable services to al of us.
