Online gaming is a huge industry and contains a wide variety of opportunities for blockchain applications. As an avid gamer, I'm following these developments closely. Here is this week's analysis on projects that I feel are poised to become major leaders in the space.
Virtual goods transactions:
www.waxtoken.com/www.enjincoin.ioThese two are in a similar in concept but with quite different approaches. Enjin is a well established gaming community creation platform with Minecraft as one of their main focuses. WAX is being built by the founders of OpSkins, a huge marketplace for purchasing virtual goods, especially weapons and other items for Steam games. Both promise to greatly improve commerce of virtual game items by reducing transaction costs and risks of fraud. Because of their different focuses, they won't be directly competing until they both grow considerably.
Online Intellectual Games
www.MindSports.IOThere are a couple of blockchain projects in development for playing certain games online, but this one stands out. MindSports will feature playing, spectating, and betting on games, as well as robust user-generated content. They plan to support 10+ games including poker, chess, Go, shogi, xiangqi, backgammon, and more.
Gaming on the Cloud
www.playkey.io A lot of people have a hard time keeping their computers up-to-date enough to play high-end games. There are some services which allow streaming of these high performance games to users, but they are generally quite expensive. This project will bring cloud gaming into the blockchain, allowing participants with powerful computers to host high end games and stream them to players. Players will be able to play high end games on machines that would otherwise be incapable of running them while paying a minimal fee in cryptocurrency to the host.
Would love to hear more ideas in this space! What's your favorite?
