In 2020, platform-agnostic in-game microtransactions will reformulate the term ‘symbiotic relationship.’ As gaming needs blockchain, and crypto needs gaming.

Currently, Bitcoin’s price prevails far below its all-time high, and the same can be said for the majority of altcoins. Since 2018 there have been notable achievements carried forward by a variety of blockchain and crypto startups. Still, the sector has yet to pinpoint a specific use case that will drive multi-sector mass adoption.

The idea of blockchains eradicating the monopoly of big banks seems naively silly, but amusing enough, an area where distributed ledger technology could stimulate a sea change is another fairly huge industry: gaming.

In 2018 the gaming industry generated about $138.7 billion income, and data from Newzoo foretells that this figure will grow by 9.6% in 2019 to reach an approximate revenue of $152.1 billion.

Presently, the Asia-Pacific region estimates for $72.2 billion in revenue, and this signifies 47% of the global games market income for the year. The US comes second with $43.4 billion in revenue produced in 2018. While this figure is less than that of the Asia-Pacific region, it is 18% higher than in 2017.

Despite these mind-boggling figures, growth in the gaming industry is sinking. A recently announced gaming industry market prediction published by Forbes suggests that growth within the sector is shrieking to a halt.

The issue is that gamers are buying more content and subscriptions, but accessory and hardware sales are declining. Another problem is the failure of gamers to use one universal digital currency to make P2P and in-game cross-platform purchases. Data from a LendEDU survey of 1,000 gamers analyzed that players who spent 6-10 hours playing, 69% of them did micropayments totaling $84.67 on average.

Currently, gamers are restricted from making purchases by a credit card, which presents privacy risks, or they have to collect a mass of several tokens that are stored on different platforms and comparatively restricted for their use.

The sector needs a universal digital currency or token that can smoothly be exchanged across games to make P2P transactions or in-game purchases at each platform’s e-store.

Gamers making in-game transactions present themselves to risk as they are expected to keep a credit or debit card on file, and the never-ending recurrence of multi-billion-dollar hacks against major multinational corporations involves the threat of being cheated is ever-present.

PoA networks preserve participants against administration and hacks as the authority of the participant serves as the proof of the transaction’s validity, and validators must go through a series of checks to verify that they are trusted and reliable.

PoA networks are also permissioned blockchains, and this makes them suitable for enterprise-level use, such as gaming companies like Sony, Electronic Arts, and Activision Blizzard.

Ubisoft recently announced that it would trial EOS blockchain to assist gaming and micro-transactions within its network. As Ethereum Express CEO Vlad Miller recently said, “One of the significant advantages of such platforms is the ability to scale horizontally. PoA services can combine computing power for joint transaction processing, thus increasing the throughput of the entire network.”

As 5G technology spreads throughout America and gaming continues to move to personal mobile devices rather than stationary consoles, the popularity of platform-agnostic MMORPG formats that support tens of thousands of players at a time will continue to grow. Fortnite and Minecraft have already shown the power and value of in-game purchases and microtransactions.

In 2017 and 2018, cryptocurrency and blockchain were lauded as the technology which would build the payment infrastructure the gaming industry needs to climb to the next level. Currently, gamers accumulate a vast amount of platform and game-specific tokens, which cannot be transferred cross-platform, and this has led to the development of secondary markets where gamers carelessly barter and trade for the game-specific digital currencies they require.

The sector needs swappable, universal, multi-chain digital assets that can be transacted and transferred across thousands of games, notwithstanding their platform and licensing.