The old
In traditional video games you see many different developers and publishing companies trying to compete in various areas with each other. Most of them develop their own worlds, characters and brands resulting in a great variety of content.
Looking at Activision/Blizzard for example. We can clearly see how almost all of their games and brands empower each other through various techniques.
Their current lineup of games includes “Diablo”, “Starcraft” and “Heroes Of The Storm” (Heroes). If you have ever played one of those titles before there is a good chance that you have heard of or even checked out their other projects already.
They are heavily using cross-game marketing and promotions to move their active player base from one game to another. If you own Diablo 3 for example you’ll receive a free bonus character if you login to Heroes — the same goes for owning a copy of Starcraft and vice versa.
Additionally there are frequent events throughout the year where players will receive significant boosts and advantages in exchange for them trying out the other franchises. These boosts could be anything ranging from gaining more experience in their initial (favorite) franchise to receiving rewards like loot boxes in both and so on.
You can see the possibilities are nearly endless and are only limited by the creativity of the franchise owner and copyright reasons.
So while in Heroes Of The Storm you can already play most of your favorite characters from different Blizzard franchises it is very unlikely and probably impossible to play for example Mario which is owned by a different company, Nintendo.
In order to make this happen, both companies would have to go through a lot of hassle and paperwork to even think about this partnership.
This is where blockchain comes into play.
The new
Since late 2017, we have seen a steady rise of new decentralized apps (dApps) such as CryptoKitties, running on public blockchains like Ethereum.
Most of those dApps are games or at least do have some game-like interactions which create some very unique opportunities for new projects also supporting the widely used ERC-721 token standard.
We are already seeing a lot of Third-Party marketplaces for those tokens popping up everywhere, one example being OpenSea.io:
You can buy and trade these game-specific assets against Ethereum and even with each other on certain other exchanges.
But — there is more!
User Acquisition empowered by an open architecture
Since almost all of these projects are based on the exact same token standard you can technically implement them into your project(!).
Let’s say your game is a MOBA-style game(just like Heroes Of The Storm) then you could allow players to use their existing tokens as player characters in your game — most of these tokens lack functionality and mechanics themselves but this should not stop you from adding and extending them through your platform.
One example of such an implementation is ChainMonsters.io:
In this specific game you explore the world, collect monsters and battle against your opponents while following a traditional story line.
As you can see there is a specific area designed for such interactions so this little part of the experience does not hurt the core game or its’ economy but rather enables people to explore and checkout the overall project itself.
In this case players do have to go through a trainer creation process but then are immediately offered to try out their kitties — you can improve this whole process by showing user specific targeted “ads” in-game allowing you to guide them into the right direction, here we do have a small arena right at the start.
This area unlocks a minigame for CryptoKitty owners
Using the power of blockchain and ERC-721 you can use your CryptoKitties to fight against others in a special and standalone gameplay experience. It does not change any game relevant data and is designed to be a minigame — but it also teaches new players a little bit about the project and its’ mechanics which comes in handy in case they decide to continue and explore the game further.
If you own at least one CryptoKitty then you can play this minigame!
The data on the blockchain is open but this does not count for the proprietary artwork made by Axiom Zen (!), creators of CryptoKitties — I have reached out to them and will try to push into a full native implementation with them, this leaves us with using our very own art for this little demonstration for now though. But in theory the technology is there to expand it even further and display the official token images in-game.
You could easily extend this and add rewards as well — or go even one step further.
