Circle Solutions | Digital Dollar Stablecoin Solutions for the Gaming Industry
Learn how digital dollar stablecoins can create new in-game payment infrastructures and revenue opportunities for game developers and gamers.
Online gaming is a booming industry. Millions of gamers worldwide battle it out in virtual worlds - from Fortnite to Minecraft and Counter-Strike to League of Legends - to win tournaments, level up their avatars, or beat the high score. But what has been missing in online gaming is a universal in-game currency that can be spent across games as well as outside of the gaming ecosystem. That’s where global stablecoins come into play.
[2.5 billion](https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-generate-152-1-billion-in-2019-as-the-u-s-overtakes-china-as-the-biggest-market/#:~:text=There are now more than 2.5 billion gamers across the world.) people play video games. That’s 32 percent of the global population. The online gaming industry — which includes PC games, console games, and mobile games — is expected to generate annual revenues of $196 billion by 2022.
From the early days of simple online games when the Internet became readily available in the 1990s to today’s arenas filled with professional eSports athletes competing in high stakes tournaments, online gaming has come a long way.
Blockchain games only make up a tiny piece of the overall online gaming pie today. However, it is a gaming segment that is poised to grow in the coming years.
Online gaming is one of the most touted blockchain use cases. The ability for players to wholly own in-game items - thanks to the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) - is an innovation that did not exist previously. Moreover, the blockchain brings an unprecedented level of transparency and decentralization to the online gaming sphere, to the benefit of the gamer.
<aside> ✏️ But why make the tokens non-fungible? Making them non-fungible might work to the advantage of pure-gaming companies that want to benefit directly from the purchase of consumable goods but for us we would actually want the tokens to be "fungible" (aka able to be turned back into money) as we want to facilitate payments, the holding of assets, liquidity, and underwritten (risk-reduced) transactions as our model is being a bank. NFTs help the conventional model accelerate but FTs (fungible tokens) will be necessary if we are to posit ourselves as a banking service.
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As a result, gaming DApps are among the most popular decentralization applications in the market today.
According to the DApp Review Q1/2020 report, out of the 641 active DApps on the Ethereum blockchain, 180 (~28%) are decentralized gaming apps. What’s more, blockchain games are the largest category of active DApps on the Ethereum network.
<aside> ✏️ At some point we might want to consider creating our own protocol/stable token/"crypto" (hate using that word because it makes it feels very speculative) as it can be a strong source of defensibility and a way for us to have more ownership of the "financial highways" and therefore more leverage over other networks and competitors.
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On the EOS and Tron blockchains, blockchain games amount to 17% and 14% of active DApps, respectively, which is a testament to the growing demand for decentralized gaming experiences.
According to a report by Dapp.com, the number of blockchain gamers has almost tripled from 2018 to 2019, increasing from 166,370 to 436,700 globally. The reason for the jump in demand can be attributed to: