Gaming companies face cryptocurrency battle

Experts in the world of electronic games are concerned about the interest of large companies in the sector in blockchain technology, one of the pillars of cryptocurrencies, which has recently collapsed.

“Everything that happens in this space right now is just bad, not to say terrible,” Brazilian game designer Mark Venturelli explained in an interview with AFP.

Venturelli was recently invited by the biggest gaming festival in Brazil, in São Paulo, to talk about the future of the billionaire sector.

Venturelli, a designer of games like Relic Hunters, took the opportunity to launch a tough thirty-minute speech on blockchain technology, which over the past decade has served to dramatically boost the emergence of thousands of cryptocurrencies such as ethereum.

The blockchain

Blockchain, or blockchain, is a technology that allows you to track any operation on the internet around a digital product since its birth.

Every time the product changes hands, the transaction is entered into the chain, which is unbreakable, unfalsifiable and verifiable at any time.

Creators can register ownership of their works on the blockchain using so-called NFTs, which are a kind of title deeds.

According to cryptoculture advocates, this technology allows video game users to recover part of the money they invest in their hobby, with the creation and sale of avatars, for example.

For critics like Venturelli, the opposite is true: it is the manufacturers who can increase their profits, taking advantage of the lack of legislative clarity around these new technologies.

Electronic games account for an annual revenue of US$ 300 billion worldwide, according to consultancy Accenture.

industry collapse

The collapse of cryptocurrencies has dragged all sectors, such as the art and luxury markets, that have turned to blockchain technology and the issuance of NFTs.

“Right now, no one is using blockchain-based games,” Newzoo’s Mihai Vicol told AFP.

This expert explained that between 90% and 95% of games based on this technology were affected by the ‘crash’ of cryptocurrencies.

Ubisoft, one of the big companies in the sector, tried last year to create an NFT market based on one of its most important games, but the announcement provoked a wave of criticism on the forums, which led the company to quickly abandon the idea.

The company that created Minecraft, a very popular game among young people, announced last month that it would not use blockchain technology.

The company criticized “the speculative mindset” of the NFTs and stated that their use would be “inconsistent with the long-term satisfaction of our players”.

Last week, analyst firm NonFungible revealed that the gaming industry using NFT lost 22% of its sales last year.

Supporters of NFTs claim that blockchain technology allows users to transfer objects from one game to another. By purchasing them through NFT, they become their owners, theoretically being able to resell them.

For Vicol, however, the technology in question “may be the future, but it will be different from the way people use it today.”