EA recently announced they will remove paid loot boxes from Star Wars Battlefront II — an attempt to alleviate the controversy caused by a comment that earned EA the number 1 rank for the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.
Currently sitting at -670K, it bypasses the next most downvoted post by 646.6K — and that poster literally asked for it!
The outrage started after EACommunityTeam replied to Redditor MBMMaverick who asked “Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?”, and got worse when another player published a spreadsheet showing how long it would take to unlock items — some up to 60 hours.
The damage is not just to EA’s fanbase and many requests to get a refund — it also triggered a series of legal actions.
The question is; was this avoidable? Could EA come up with a model that was fair and transparent, so users would know the pricing policies in advance, and also could have a say and vote for those policies?
As the generation who grew up in front of PlayStations and Xboxes, we love playing games, and some of us even try to make money from it. eSports — video games played competitively for both online and in-person audiences — are surging in popularity and are widely considered to be the fastest growing “sport” in the world. Estimates suggest that global eSports revenues for 2018 will reach nearly $1bn.
Still, we are facing tons of problems in this $1bn industry; large companies taking large portions of the revenue just for publishing the game, payments sometimes take up to 60 days, the payment system is opaque and the distribution is unfair. Not to mention disputes, which are inefficient and biased.
The problem is not in EA’s decision to lock up the most wanted parts of the game — it is the centralized payment model that is failing, in all of these areas.
Blockchain has the potential to solve all of these and evolve the gaming industry.
The Blockchain Solution
Blockchain offers an unhackable [1], transparent, online person-to-person[2] transaction system, that stores records of all transactions in its history. This seemingly simple concept lays the foundation for an entirely new generation of internet interaction; one without middlemen where scarcity actually exists. Before the blockchain, any piece of digital info could be duplicated. This is a serious problem for the fintech industry — you should not be able to duplicate your money. With blockchain’s hack-proof system, a transparent ledger stores the entire history of all transactions — effectively eliminating the double-spending problem.
This opens the door to numerous opportunities:
1. Fair payments
“If you are developer with a game on Google or Apple, you will pay up to 30 percent of your top line revenues to the platform, leaving you 70 percent of every dollar spent for — or in — your game,” according to Sergey Sholom, VP of business development at Los Angeles-based blockchain firm GameCredits. “And typical wait times to receive your 70 percent payout are up to 60 days.”
Blockchain could disrupt this industry, where users would pay the developers directly. Furthermore, microtransactions even make the distribution of the payment more fair inside the development company — smart contracts can control the exact share every person should receive.
Even players can earn better with the blockchain — their in-game achievements can be rewarded with game tokens that are valuable even outside the game environment.
2. True asset ownership
Anything you buy in the game would actually be yours — even if the company would close your account or shut down their servers, your ownership would still exist on the blockchain. Combine that with scarcity and you will have something unique — if there are a certain number of items on the platform, no one can ever have more. This effectively prevents illegal duplication and cheating.
This feature is also the groundwork for a new generation of games; CryptoKitties, followed by CryptoCelebrities and CryptoCountries. In these games, rarity plays an important role; there is only one kind of a cat, or a celebrity, or a country.
3. Trade
When the items are yours, you can trade them anyhow you want. In the case of Star Wars Battlefront II:
“With Blockchain, players could have sold back or traded the items from the loot boxes” said Manon Burgel, co-founder of B2Expand whose company uses Blockchain to provide full access to virtual goods outside of the game and gives players the ability to securely trade or sell them. “I think this could have made a positive impact on how players see the money they invest and contribute to reduce the controversy.”
B2Expand is putting this concept in play in their game Beyond the Void — a competitive RTS space game. They are also working on a cross-game ecosystem where players can port in-game assets to different games thanks to the game-independent nature of blockchain.
4. Betting
Betting is the driving force for many eSports enthusiasts. Blockchain can make betting fair and transparent, make the payouts much faster and easier, and also cut on the extra transaction costs. This could drive even more people to this multi-million-dollar industry.
HEROcoin is one of the platforms that targets this need. Instead of relying on middlemen or other parties that could influence the results, you now can rely only on what you can doublecheck and proofread yourself. This eliminates the risk of corruption, fraud and manipulation. No need to trust anyone, because the blockchain takes care of it for you.
5. Disputes
Very few people in eSports are afraid of getting sued for their wrongdoings, in large because they know the cost and the time associated with litigation makes it a nearly impossible route to take in most cases.
With blockchain’s smart contracts, everything is publicly and transparently coded inside the system — leaving no room for many kinds of misbehavior.
6. Voting
Being unhackable, blockchain offers a solution where votes are genuine and the risk of manipulation is considerably low. As such, the fans can have much more say in the direction the developers should take, paying for specific ideas and abandoning others.
Closing Thoughts
EA could probably avoid the problems it faces by using blockchain. That is of course, not an overnight decision — the blockchain would need to be baked into their technology. Blockchain is not just about the payment model but also about democratizing the process and giving fans more control; it is obvious the fans of Star Wars Battlefront II would never had allowed the locking policy get into the game in the first place.
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[1] Blockchain can be hacked, but it would require a considerable number of bad players — more than 51% of the entire blockchain network. Given the blockchain machines combined have more computer power than Google, this is very unlikely to happen
