User:RenegadeMinds/sandbox

Video games
Video games can use blockchain for different purposes. Some common uses are for in-game digital asset storage and payments. However, games can also be completely decentralized similar to Bitcoin.

Most blockchain games are built on top of an existing blockchain platform. Two older games have their own blockchain, Huntercoin and Motocoin, and a company in South Korea is releasing games each with their own blockchain.

The world's first blockchain game is Huntercoin,    a completely decentralised MMOG  that runs on its own blockchain and allows players to collect coins on a map that can be sold for bitcoins.

CryptoKitties launched in November 2017 and made headlines in December 2017 when a cryptokitty character - an in-game virtual pet - was sold for more than US$100,000. CryptoKitties illustrated scalability problems for games on Ethereum when it created significant congestion on the Ethereum network with about 30% of all Ethereum transactions being for the game.

In-game assets on the blockchain can take on different forms with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) being common. NFTs on the blockchain were pioneered in Namecoin and are used in the Cryptokitties game among many others.

Adoption of blockchain technology for video games is garning greater mainstream acceptance with well-known brands such as Formula 1 licensing its brand to Animoca to release the F1 Delta Time game. Atari shares rose over 60% after it announced it would become involved in the blockchain video game space. South Korean Kakao Corp. raised $90 million through a private coin offering and its crypto subsidiary, Group X, is introducing various services and dapps, including games. Ubisoft, a major game studio, is also active in blockchain games. Still, other major game studios, such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard have not yet entered into the blockchain video games space.

Talk Page Content
The video games section has languished with little more than a mention of Cryptokitties and aggressive content deletions. Previous content with RS has been removed for "not RS", e.g. The University of Pittsburgh is "not RS"? The Ledger peer-reviewed journal (part of the University of Pittsburgh) is most certainly RS as per Scholarship. Other content with reliable sources has also been aggressively deleted. Bitcoin Magazine and many other mainstream crypto news sites have been around for a significant period of time and are well established in the space.

I've added a huge amount of content with plenty of RS citations and rewritten this section so that it's actually useful to some degree. The basic structure of the section is now:


 * Basic introduction
 * Explanation of platform vs. own blockchain
 * World's first blockchain game
 * Well known blockchain game, Cryptokitties
 * In-game assets description, NFTs
 * Adoption with examples

The article can certainly be expanded, e.g. a subsection on various methods of asset storage would be nice as would an explanation of how smart contracts fail to deliver scalability and cannot support very interesting games beyond extremely basic ones. Also, there are a fair number of RS articles on the various platforms, so it might make a nice addition to have more about the various platforms. A comparison table would make a nice visual.

The platform vs. own blockchain section sets out the distinct methods of putting games and/or in-games assets on a blockchain. This is a critical distinction. The vast majority of games are built on a platform.

Regarding Huntercoin, the first blockchain MMO game, it is very well known by everyone in the industry and is most certainly notable. For non-technical editors, Huntercoin is technically well ahead of the vast majority of blockchain games even now. To understand blockchain video games you need to understand the underlying technologies at work. Decentralization for asset storage on a blockchain is pretty trivial, e.g. ERC-20 tokens used for storage. A 100% blockchain game exists entirely on the blockchain even past any "end of life" and end of developer support for a game, which of released games only Huntercoin and Motocoin fulfill.

The section on in-game assets is quite short and doesn't get into much detail beyond the very basics. Further expansion requires more technical information, which can get added at a later date. That may require a subsection on game state processors and smart contracts as they're relevant for digital assets and how they're handled. Cross chain swaps are another issue relevant for digital assets, however there is no other information in the Blockchain article about that yet.

Also for the section on in-game assets, it would be good to add in different methods of creating tokens and NFTs, e.g. ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155, and the Namecoin "name" method. Also for NFTs, a section on NFT usage in games would be nice, e.g. art, collectibles, virtual real estate in games, etc.

The section on adoption is mostly examples from well known companies for now.

Hopefully other editors can add to this article rather than hastily delete relevant information. The principle of inclusion should prevail, otherwise we'll be left with nothing but "Cryptokitties", which is shamefully deficient.

--RenegadeMinds (talk) 19:00, 20 July 2019 (UTC)