Project in Online Gaming?

[JustinCase42]

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 are some thoughts on projects that I feel are poised to become major leaders in the space. I'd love to hear more ideas!
Virtual goods transactions:
www.waxtoken.com
www.enjincoin.io
These 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.IO
There 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.
As always, I'm on the lookout for more great projects. Post your ideas and feedback below!

[Athreos]

I am having some difficulty in understanding how blockchain greatly improves online marketplaces. If these projects gain any traction, what is going to stop incumbents from actually investing in their online marketplaces rather than having them be an afterthought as they are now? Couldn't incumbents easily render most of these projects ineffective without using blockchain themselves?

[JustinCase42]

Blockchain technology provides the opportunity for several significant improvements in online marketplaces, especially online marketplaces dealing with virtual goods such as in the online gaming industry.

1. Greatly reduced transaction costs.
Dealing with fiat currencies, credit cards, etc, is very expensive. Whether the customer sees that cost directly, or experiences it indirectly in the form of increased prices, it adds friction and loss to the system.
2. Opportunity for peer-to-peer transactions without fraud
Purchasing virtual goods from a reputable website has always been relatively easy. Peer-to-peer transactions, however, has been difficult and fraught with danger. If a player wants to purchase an account, character, or virtual item from another player, preventing fraud is extremely difficult. Traditionally, online marketplaces had to act as a mediator and escrow, another difficult and expensive process when dealing entirely with virtual property and individuals over the internet. By recording ownership and transactions on the blockchain, fraud becomes nearly impossible.
3. Many individuals live in countries where buying things online at all is very difficult. For them, it will still somewhat difficult to get fiat money into a cryptocurrency but, once that's accomplished, individuals can exchange them for any cryptocurrency they need and buy and sell property online safely and cheaply. They can even start by earning cryptocurrency and operating entirely without fiat for those kinds of transactions.

[CodyAlfaridzi]

Hello, glad to see another gamer on this forum! Do you follow OPSkins development recently? I was surprised to receive an email from OPskins.com offering WAX Token pre-sale ICO. Since when does the original founder (Arthur Minacov) step down as CEO of OPSkins? I learned that he is no longer involved in OPSkins.com and these new guys are people whose familiar with ICO/crypto industry.

For those who don't know, OPSkins.com is a marketplace for Steam in-game item, mostly for CS:GO skins. They are the pioneer of automated CS:GO (and later Steam item) marketplace and easily become the biggest so far. I actively using their service a few years ago when I was still playing CS:GO.

It never crossed my mind that they would conduct an ICO considering their business is already a money-making machine. It's like Bitfinex or BTC-e creating an ICO because they wanted to expand their business. Weird and fishy. I don't like it at all considering how ICO is still a controversial way of fundraising in pretty much all over the world.

[JustinCase42]

Actually, the fact that they are an existing business lends them a certain degree of credibility. It's not one of those anonymous groups we know nothing about who will likely raise money in an ICO and the disappear forever.
These folks run a reputable, successful business already and want to expand. That puts them ahead of the crowd in my opinion.

Regarding your question of "why would they want to raise money since they are already making money?"
Businesses do that all the time! Starting a business, proving it can make money, showing that it could make even more money with some additional funding for expansion, and raising another round of venture capital is common practice.

The final reason for them to do this is that it allows cryptocurrency/smart contracts for sales. This allows things like safe, peer-to-peer transactions, reduced transaction costs, etc. I think any online marketplace would benefit greatly from a well thought-out strategy for leveraging cryptocurrencies.

[sjbi]

There are many of them. And most of the projects have been already implemented in one or more game/gaming platform.
Triforce being one of them.

[krauzzer02]

There's a lot of ICO, gaming platform, tokens, games stores, exchanges that implements blockchain systems and interfaces and uses bitcoin and any other altcoins or tokens to buy gaming item, values and a game itself that is good to hear because it is a growing industry however it also impose such risk like trading and investing in cryptocurrency that may lead to scam or hacking of gaming account, not all of course there is some legit stores and sellers like Steam that let you accept bitcoin as a payment. Online project for gaming is a great plan but it most come with the precaution and proper researching for you to find the best and authentic one.

[helin9108]

 You given all good projects and also all interesting , all of these seem to have good and solid team management and pretty good ideas, but I want to add one project that I researched and looks good, thats Dmarket.Visit www.dmarket.io. Dmarket fills a desperately needed hole in the virtual property space. Gamers spend huge amounts of money buying virtual game items. This takes a lot of the risks and hassles out of that process and opens up opportunities for a lot of gamers who just can't participate right now.

[JustinCase42]

I've looked into DMarket and honestly, I'm not nearly as impressed. It is certainly possible that they could turn into a successful company. However, WAX and Enjin both do similar things, but already have reputable, established businesses. This makes them a much lower risk, in my opinion.