Since time immemorial, people have been playing games for money. Something that adults usually stop doing when they have to start earning serious money to make a living. Becoming rich through play used to be reserved for the top 1% of esports athletes. But, in the past year, this has rapidly become possible for a much larger group of people, thanks to GameFi. I think this will be the biggest trend in cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the coming year.
The global gaming industry is now more than 4 times the size of the global film and music industries combined. The gaming industry has an annual revenue of more than $267 billion , compared to the film industry at $42.5 billion and the music industry at $19 billion in 2018, including streaming. Approximately 3 billion people now play online games, although many don’t consider themselves “gamers” (yes, even Candy Crush counts).
Big tech & big bux
Let’s take a look at the ‘in-game purchases’. These are the upgrades you can buy within a game, like a fancy virtual piece of clothing or a sword. Last year, $145 billion was spent on this. Critics who don’t believe people are spending money on digital art ( NFTs ) and digital clothing should take a look at the sheer size of this within the gaming sector alone. As The Washington Post put it so nicely :
Kids Don’t Want Cash Anymore – They Want ‘Robux’
Robux is the virtual money that allows you to buy virtual items on one of the largest gaming platforms.
Even though Google recently announced that it would stop its own gaming platform Stadia, other big tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are investing heavily in their own games and platforms. They also see how much money there is to be made in this sector. A sector that continues to grow in terms of users and turnover. A bizarre example is Apple. Apple is the only one that does not make games itself. This while 80% of the money is earned by games in the App Store. More than 1 billion people play games on the iPhone or iPad, making iOS by far the most popular video game platform in the world.
Due to the large amount of money that big tech is investing in gaming, an insane amount of games are coming onto the market. But the influence of big tech also has disadvantages. Just like in the field of AI (between Google and Microsoft), there is a big battle between the titans going on for the user. Recently, even governments have put a stop to this. norway email list 1.6 million contact leads They have blocked the takeover of one of the largest game developers (ActivisionBlizzard) by Microsoft, worth almost $ 70 billion.
Person who is gaming online.
The rise of transparent gardens
But the ‘walled gardens’ are also becoming increasingly strategies for software as a service companies visible. Apple has recently been in the news for this. For example, because it kept its own ecosystem so closed that all payments within the App Store have to go through the company and it charges a 30% commission for this. This alone has brought in $85 america email list billion in the past year . You also have these kinds of closed ecosystems within the gaming industry. This makes it impossible, for example, to take a nice virtual piece of clothing or sword from one game to another.
Since the rise of blockchain technology, we have seen several applications that change the way we exchange and store value. What started as an open and more transparent way of storing and sending money (Bitcoin) evolved into an open and more transparent way of storing proofs of ownership of assets (Tokanization, which also includes NFTs). One of the most interesting new applications in the blockchain space in my opinion is GameFi. A concept that combines traditional