It seems like cryptocurrency is all the rage these days, especially for enabling decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer transactions. However, one application that hasn’t been explored much so far is its use in gaming, but this may be about to change.
Although the digital currency has been around for a while now, most people have not really seen its benefits as a way to purchase games or make in-game purchases with increased anonymity and reduced risk of fraud or chargebacks.
Why is this?
One reason is the difficulty in buying into the cryptocurrency ecosystem and diving into it. The other reason is that mainstream online gaming platforms are not yet massive enough to support a significant number of transactions, let alone an entire ecosystem of digital currencies.
However, this may change soon as more people begin to use cryptocurrencies for payments and transactions within an online community, which would benefit the game developers and gamers.
The most important reasons why cryptocurrency may be a good fit for gaming are its ability to transfer funds which can’t be reversed, increased privacy and localized transaction fees. Using Ethereum as an example, let’s discuss why these features would be of particular benefit.
Irreversible Payments: One of the most significant benefits of using cryptocurrency is that payments are irreversibly sent and can’t be reversed or charged back. This is a problem for the game industry which often gets its revenues from in-game purchases and microtransactions.
Better Privacy: Each transaction on the Ethereum network is entirely private and secure, with requests and confirmations not being visible to anyone aside from the sender, receiver and miners who process transactions.
Localized Transaction Fees: Unlike credit cards that have a set fee for international transactions, using cryptocurrencies like Ethereum would allow developers to charge localized fees depending on where users are sending their funds.
Gaming Industry Will Benefit From Cryptocurrency
The game industry can potentially benefit a lot from cryptocurrency as it would allow them to transfer funds in a private, secure and decentralized way. Furthermore, their transactions would also be extremely cheap since the transactions of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum are not processed by banks, thus reducing costs significantly.
Even though some of these benefits are great, they may come at the expense of security and privacy, which is something that offline businesses may want to ensure as well.
For example, currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are relatively new, which means that there aren’t many transactions to analyze, which would make it difficult to provide the same level of security and privacy as traditional banking transactions.
Nevertheless, the benefits of cryptocurrency outweighed its drawbacks in most cases and made it an excellent option for gaming transactions. However, blockchain technology may be an even better solution for commerce in the future.
