Decentralizing Video Game distribution and Resale

Video Games is a 108 billion dollar industry as of 2017. With graphics that are extremely realistic and with super engaging gameplay, millions of gamers around the world are consuming games at a very fast pace. The availability of GPUs to almost everyone is allowing for a wider audience to start gaming.

Like all big industries, there are a few large players in the market and their dominance in the market hurts a lot of smaller game development studios. Every big game development corporation are seeking to build their own marketplace. As of Today, Steam by Valve Corporation has been the most successful to aggregate a lot of developers onto their platform. Having over 12000 game titles from developers all around the world, they are dominating the space. However, companies like Ubisoft, despite partnering with Valve for their Game distribution, have their own marketplace called UPlay. Same is the case with Electronic Arts and their marketplace Origin.

There are a lot of threats that the game developers face. Most of the video games now are digitally distributed. And like any digital asset, these games face piracy in the form of illegal distribution or third-party distribution without the developers getting any profit. Another big threat they face is the loss of revenues due to the unauthorized resale of games. This is again a loss of revenue to the game developers.

To counter some of these measures, many game developers release an endless online multi-player version of the game for gamers to play with their friends or anyone else in the world. These game development studios have released their online version as an open universe where anyone can develop items and sell it as in-game products. These in-game products have now become very popular and almost all the games have them.

However, not all the games can be turned into an online open universe and so the problems that we have discussed earlier still exists. To sum it up thus far, we have three parties the game developers, the gamers and the third party in-game accessories developers. All have a lot of challenges that they face and the answer to solving almost all of it is to have a decentralized system to facilitate distribution, resale and profit sharing.

Here is how a decentralized system built using a blockchain can help the entire gaming industry. To bring in uniformity, the blockchain will have tokens (virtual currency) which will be used as a mode of payment across all the stakeholders in the blockchain. Game developers will put out a title that gamers can purchase. Anyone, who wishes to purchase the rights to develop in-game accessories can be given appropriate rights so that they can list their accessory on the marketplace.

When a gamer completes a game or wishes to sell it, he can do so to anyone interested at a price point he/she chooses. And when someone makes a purchase, automatically, a percentage of the price goes to the game developers. This way, both the gamers and the game developers can profit from resale.

On the other hand, the developers of the accessories will also get a small percentage when a game with their accessory gets sold. The redistribution is on a peer-to-peer level and everyone can be compensated fairly. The blockchain ledgers are immutable and thus, a traceability feature can help track the ownership and avoid any kind of fraud that might occur.

There is another big advantage to smaller game developers. They don't have to shell out a fortune anymore to get listed on to some of the large marketplace or end-up having to give up a large chunk of revenue as commission to those sites. Game developers will have one large open market to sell games without any restrictions imposed by the middlemen.

This awesome idea is being implemented by Robot Cache, a blockchain company trying to build a decentralized gaming marketplace for the PC gaming industry. This solution does seem very interesteing.

For a completely decentralized system, we would need the governance of the system to be decentralized as well. The creators of the networks can benefit from the sale with an extremely small amount, going to them as incentives. Achieving this is definitely possible and it's only a matter of time, we will have it.