Epic Meta: Immortalise Your Gameplay!
By: Epic Meta
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Nft, Esport

The Rise of Professional Gamers

Beginning with their mid-twentieth century inception, video games have evolved from featuring coarsely-pixelated visualisations manipulated by clunky consoles to sporting high-definition graphics on personal computers and mobile phones, often accompanied by orchestrated soundtracks and compelling voice acting.

Modern video games can seem far-removed from their early predecessors, which mostly consisted of simple challenges revolving around basic logic and reflexes or straightforward text-based ones. Today, the industry is dominated by massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) ones, which are vastly more complex in terms of online immersion, allowing contenders to collaborate and spar against artificial intelligence or rival teams.

While competitive gameplay started as early as the 1970s, this preceded the advent of social media or established leagues, which significantly limited the ability for participants to connect with each other. However, the invention of platforms such as YouTube, Twitch streaming and FaceBook ameliorated this problem by making championship-level gaming (known as ,“eSports”) tournaments highly accessible. This in turn led to the rise of full-time professional gaming becoming a viable career, fostering a positive feedback loop where an increasing talent pool of specialised players drew in swelling crowds of spectators.

The Pro-Gamer Dilemma

As of current, the two primary methods through which eSports athletes (“pro-gamers”) make their living are prize money and capitalising on their growing social media presence and catering to their supporters via gameplay streaming. Bearing this in mind, it is worth noting that major competitions only occur once every few months and that only players skilled enough to catapult themselves into the top three positions can earn enough to achieve financial stability. Since relying on the former can be financially precarious, online community-building makes it possible for them to receive fan donations or sponsorship contracts, on top of potentially gaining advertising revenue.

However, this means that they must strictly adhere to a taxing schedule when producing content to maintain their user base, which regularly results in exhaustion to the point of burn out. Failing to produce content for even a week means that they will need to redouble their efforts upon their return to prevent their viewership count from flagging — predictably, this can soon morph into a gruelling treadmill of overwork and fatigue.

The Epic Meta Solution

Epic Meta has seen the severity of this endemic problem, and is pioneering a solution that will allow pro-gamers to enjoy career sustainability through tokenizing Esports player cards and game-changing tournament highlights as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called, “moments”. This empowers them to create a passive income stream from the royalties generated through the trading of these NFTs. We were inspired by the enthusiasm with which mainstream sports aficionados collect and trade soccer, baseball and basketball player cards, some of which have soared to millions of dollars in value due to popular demand.

Like these much-beloved traditional cards, our NFTs will be sorted into a variety of booster packs which members of our community can purchase. These booster packs will contain player cards of various tiers as well as gaming “moments” on a randomly-assigned basis. Traders can utilise our marketplace to swap these player cards and tokenized highlights if they were not lucky enough to receive the ones of their choice, thereby generating the aforementioned royalties. As an added bonus, this can become another source of publicity for aspiring players who are aiming to expand their budding fanbases. On top of this, a portion of the accrued transaction fees will be channeled towards the Epic Meta Tournament Sponsorship Fund, which was founded to support a plethora of eSports tournaments and to host in-house tournaments where eager community members can join their favourite eAthletes in competitive gameplay.

We invite you to join us on our mission to create a more equitable and sustainable environment which can drive the future of this emerging arena.

About Epic Meta

Epic meta aims to leverage blockchain technology to create an equitable and sustainable ecosystem for professional gamers and fans alike. For more information, please visit our website, join our Telegram community discussion group and announcement channel

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