Where Blockchain Meets Gaming

Each day, after my morning meetings, I spend roughly twenty minutes playing a variety of games.

These games are unique as the points I accumulate by playing them are currency I can spend or save as I see fit. Each day I earn about what you spend on coffee in various cryptocurrency. Over the past three years, careful management of these currencies has produced a nest egg for my family.

I’d like to tell you how I got here and where I believe gaming is going.

I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are bugging my father to play Gorillas on our home computer with its 1gb hard drive far before the days of ‘operating systems’. The Nintendo Entertainment System was a childhood best friend and, as I grew up our first modem meant access to Everquest and this brand new game called Starcraft. Later in a Junior High School art class I met a friend who’s brother was renovating his kitchen with funds gained by selling in-game currency and my mind was blown by this ‘crossing of the streams’ from Everquest platinum to United States Dollars.

A decade and a half later, I’m in college reading about cryptocurrencies from a cinder block dorm room. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they thought cryptocurrency was stupid or a scam the first time they heard about it before learning more and coming around. I never had that phase. I’ve always believed this is the path forward.

Shoot ahead another decade and a half full of ‘food service’, ‘home care’ jobs, and putting myself through college. I’ve got a degree. Conversations with a friend's new roommate turn into a job interview and the interviewer can smell my passion and how ready I am for change. I get an opportunity. Five years, 2 layoffs, and a cross country move later I’m a tech professional working for my third company in the blockchain industry and have a skill-set and list of experience that mean I get to wake up each day, study blockchain, and work with amazing people solving interesting problems. As someone who spent a lot of nights scrubbing down kitchens I have a lot of gratitude for my current position.

Along the way I’ve always had a particular interest in gamification and the projects that cover both blockchain and gaming. CoinDroids was my very first game. I watched CryptoKitties cripple ETH for months. Splinterlands was a dream come true as a lifelong card gamer and, through asset collection and management, became my first big payout. I am not here for the funds, I’m here because blockchain gaming seems to be the only place in gaming where much is going on that interests me. Blockchain gaming is the only place in seeing actual creativity and growth.

Coffee Break

I try to keep my list small. With so many new projects releasing these days and my ADHD it’s very easy for me to overextend.

Right now the list reads:

Guild of Guardians - Daily
Pirate Nations - Daily
Pixels - Daily
RollerCoin - Daily
SoulKeep - Daily (as available)
UpLand - Twice a week

Each of these is a gaming related project that I am currently invested in and focused on maintaining. I picture this in my head as a table of plates I’m keeping spinning because every once in a while they drop some change. I spin the plates because I enjoy spinning the plates, the change is a bonus. It’s important to not confuse games with work and turn one into the other.

These projects vary from fairly simple phone games to more complicated and in-depth RuneScape-type projects. Each of these projects has blockchain technology in some way involved. Most often this means that the ‘points’ earned by playing the game are a crypto-token, the assets used to play these games are NFTs, or there is some sort of direct cryptocurrency reward for holding a high leaderboard position.

This is to say: All of these projects are games that pay you to play them.

There are dozens of these projects out there. As someone who is naturally passionate about blockchain technology and curious about game development I’ve tried nearly all of them. The titles listed above are not the only projects worth the time, they’re just my personal favorites.

Now, it’s not all wine and roses, friends. Both the gaming industry and the cryptocurrency scene can be extremely predatory. This means that in order to navigate this space you’re going to need to know what you’re looking for, how to sniff out a scam, and when to spend your hard earned funds. Thankfully, in 2024 there are good projects out there to find. I’ve been here since 2018 and, let me tell you, that has not always been the case.

The Chaotic Birth of Blockchain Gaming

Over the past decade the blockchain gaming industry has been born, struggled to find it’s footing, and had some major growing pains. Early projects were less games and more novel experiments in what was even possible using early UTXO blockchains. In this era, not only were the games very basic but nearly any action you wanted to take in the game would be a blockchain transaction requiring its own fees. Imagine needing to pay $0.01 to make Super Mario jump. It was bad.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine, smart contracts, and ‘Layer-2’ blockchains revolutionized what was possible but reset the industry. Suddenly, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed like the perfect way to get game assets on the blockchain and a new wave of games were announced and slated for eventual release. It was extremely common to see these projects offer pre-sale packs or game assets and raise eye watering amounts of currency before much was announced beyond a title and genre. Gods Unchained set records. The games were still fairly rough and, unless you were a gamer with a decent level of blockchain knowledge, these projects were likely not on your radar at all.

Something interesting started happening in south-east asia and Axie Infinite did something really unique by damn near establishing a new industry. Suddenly players in less developed nations were able to play mobile games and, while the rewards offered by blockchain games might have seemed low for westerners, they were more than enough for those in other areas to deem worth their time.

We’ve now entered a new era of the industry where specific chains have become very friendly to this type of development. This has created natural meeting places for gamers and developers to chat about what comes next and the true next generation of ‘consoles’. This has some players left wondering if XBOX and Playstation are really there for them in the same way that HIVE, RONIN, or IMMUTABLE are.

The ‘triple-A’ gaming industry's interactions with blockchain gaming have been embarrassing at best. The Epic Store has gone so far as to release HyperPlay, a Steam-type platform for AAA blockchain integrated games. It’s a buggy mess and no one uses it but … it exists. Put simply, we just aren’t there yet. That's not stopping major players in the gaming industry from preparing for the future though and rarely a week goes by without some quiet news about major players in the space developing for blockchain.

Blockchain gaming is a many-headed beast. As strange as any subject I’ve ever found and interesting in equal measure. I never know what I’m going to find when I dig into one of these projects and that gives me a spark of wonder and creativity that I’ve not felt in AAA gaming for decades.

Renting out your gaming assets in the Splinterlands ecosystem so other players can use your cards to play the game while paying you a small amount of currency is interesting.

Stardew Valley on the blockchain where all the game items are player created and the center of town is the 2d metaverse of my dreams is interesting to me.

A virtual cryptocurrency mining game that pays out real life currency every ten-minutes real time is interesting to me.

As a gamer approaching 40 I’ve shot enough soldiers. If a game wants to hold my attention it needs to do something new and interesting. A fresh coat of paint on the same old formula no longer grabs my attention. Meta-gameplay I’ve never seen before does.

For LinkedIn