Building a Blockchain Platform for Gaming
By: Max Preusse
Tags: ICO, Gaming, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

Building a Blockchain Platform for Gaming

The potential is limitless, and we are just starting to scratch the surface.

Blockchain is a complicated concept. It has nearly limitless applications, and for all intents and purposes, you could boil it down to “this is the next internet”. But we’re going to try to do just a little bit better than that here. By the end of this read, you should have a (slightly) clearer picture of just what a blockchain is — as it pertains to gaming. We’re also going to profile a key BitGuild Platform engineer — the man who’s going to build the home for blockchain games of the future to live on.

So what is a blockchain?

The blockchain is a new kind of network. In simple terms, it’s a massive network of computers, all in charge of keeping a record of transactions. Each node on the network has the full contents of the record. When something is added to the record, it is cross referenced and checked against every other node on the network in order to ensure authenticity, at which point the record is updated everywhere to reflect the change.

This means any kind of transaction on a blockchain network is 100% verifiable, secure, and unmodifiable. It’s a brand new kind of secure exchange of information that can revolutionize, streamline, and transparently hold an untold number of industries accountable. Imagine being able to check for yourself exactly when and where the fish you got at the supermarket was caught, processed, packaged, and shipped — Or verify that your coffee is indeed free trade.

Now take that concept, and start applying it to your favorite video game — It could be any. Surely, you are already thinking of ways blockchain could affect gameplay systems such as making drop rates transparent, opening up the ability to freely trade in-game items, and so much more.

Take Hearthstone as an example; It’s a popular digital card game in which players collect cards and arrange them into decks to battle each other — not unlike the physical trading card game Magic: The Gathering. The big difference is, as the format was adapted to a digital medium, the trading aspects of the genre were killed off. Trading Card Games became Collectible Card Games, where players can’t exchange cards with each other, instead being forced to buy packs indefinitely in hopes of nailing that one card they might want to add to their deck. Some games do have systems in place where players can exchange unwanted cards for in-game currencies, eventually allowing them to acquire the card they want, but it’s a long ways from the basic elements that made the genre so popular to begin with.

On a blockchain game, a player’s cards would be tokenized, and fully owned by said player. They’d be free to do whatever they wanted with their collection, including buying select cards, selling duplicates, and trading with other players. And it doesn’t stop there. It could be applied to almost any genre in some capacity. In-game economies would essentially be no different from a real world market — with the added bonus of being able to freely trade their virtual goods at their leisure, without any kind of restrictions imposed on them by developers and publishers with the intent to maximize profits at the expense of good game design. The potential is truly limitless, and we are just starting to scratch the surface…

How is BitGuild going to do this?

Step by step. We’re building a place blockchain games can call home. A solid foundation upon which both BitGuild and third-party developers can create a new breed of games, harnessing these newfound possibilities by weaving them into gameplay systems in new and unexpected ways…

And we’ve got just the man for the job. Mikhail is one of the few people in the world with the skill-sets needed to usher in a new age of gaming on the blockchain, and he’s been applying his knowledge and expertise to building the BitGuild Gaming platform on the blockchain.

There are three core reasons Mikhail is the right man for the task at hand. Firstly, he’s got about 30 games under his development belt, including social games on the Facebook platform, as well as experience with larger Disney branded games such as Castle: The Dangerous Game, and Gardens of Time.

Secondly, Mikhail worked at Facebook for 3 years, focusing his talents as an engineering manager for the Messenger platform. He knows how to work with large complex systems supporting thousands of simultaneous users, much like what we are aiming to grow BitGuild into.

Lastly, over the past 5 to 6 months, Mikhail has helped design and build one of the first major decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DX) systems in his personal time. We won’t go into the details of what a DX is here, but suffice to say it represents the kind of innovation we’re looking to make in the video game industry.

All of these skills, when combined, represent a kind of holy trinity when it comes to implementing blockchain into a platform from which we can grow the future of gaming. It’s impossible to predict exactly how that future will look, but BitGuild is ready to shape it into something truly special.