Esports in blockchain

Transcript

okay hello guys hello everyone thanks for joining this talk so esports and blockchain are two of the fastest growing industries today and the symbiosis between these two can benefit absolutely both the industries so the purpose of this talk is to answer three main questions what are the issues with the esports landscape number two how can the blockchain solve these issues and number three can we make a living out of a blockchain game so about me i've been working several years in the

blockchain industry i work now for monolith while on top i founded esports company which is basically an asynchronous coaching platforms for for gamers so a little context is sport is the competitive side of video gaming so are those titles which basically lasts 30 to 60 minutes and you win or lose based on if you reach some kind of goals so the market size is is huge so it's basically double the size than music and film industry combined that's for the gaming while for esports we are going to reach 2 billion in

revenue and that's just for basically tickets and for watching tournaments so that's actually pretty impressive so blockchain esports they share one thing which is the massive global audience so blockchain targets basically every human in it for financial services even those ones that don't have a bank account while the gaming population is now 2 billion and we will reach 2.5 billion in a couple of years as well as a massive increase in in the revenue while concerning titles there are just few of them which are being massively played so these numbers are for

monthly users active so we we don't have like those numbers on blockchain games yet but we have uh some other good numbers like x infinity show that there are actually million being traded i think the monthly cup for uh for this month was 300 million dollars in us to trade so that's actually impressive in terms of user we we can get there so back to the problems to understand the problems we need to speak about the panorama so it's an entertainment business and then it's built around an audience then there are four core elements pro players which plays in pro teams that can be

well mostly are private but can be also public then there are tournament organizers and then there is not just the company with the level develops the game but the game developers which are actually the most important entity of them all because they have like a lot of power and then yeah you have like second layer of the infrastructure so you have the keys from the cables to the hardware to the keyboards whatever like to the software and that there are third grade stakeholders like the sponsors investors the press yeah so the issue is mostly in the

centralization and it's not just centralization but it's hyper-centralization like you don't find this model in traditional sports for example if you speak about football there are many entities there is fifa then wave in europe different organization in in many continents so to change the rules is actually very difficult and it's a slow process while here basically the developer just just decide just decide for everyone in terms of control and ownership of assets basically a game developer can decide to ban you from the game and if you bought i don't know maybe some cards on a card game you lose the access to your assets so

those are not really yours and then yeah well transparency issues on many layers uh specific on funds being collected by crowdfunded by by these games so one positive thing about the iber centralization is actually that ethereum is born from it so vitalik was playing world of warcraft to this famous morph morpga and one day basically his main character got nerfed and when you are a teen and you are investing so much time into a game like a change like this can be like dramatic he wrote himself i cried himself he cried himself to sleep and then it it's it's here they understood that

the centralization is really bad and this was like a foundation for the creation of ethereum so a couple of real examples um we have steam which is this global market of thousands of games and they created a market for assets so it's a primary market but the thing is that you just can trade using them so what if they decide to add the restriction and they did so there were people speculating on objects that were worth thousands of dollars and one day mom just simply you can't trade it anymore

so this is real bad patch update is another example so i put league of legends but mostly all competitive games suffer from problems with patch updates so let's say a team in a competition with a price pool of millions decide to the developer decide to change the rules decides to favor one team over the other it's basically like cheating and no one can stop them because the game is there no one can do anything about it and another example is the funds being collected so dota shoe as the biggest prize pool ever in sports industry

industry it was like 40 million for the international 2020. it mostly crowdfunded i donated myself but in 2020 the international didn't happen because there was covet and so no one knew for months where those funds were so there is no transparency and this is like a real big issue while there are other secondary issues like global payments for example i don't know the team is spread across the world so using traditional banks may be problematic sometimes as well as having a startup with many i don't know employees so you have to pay all of them

lack of coordination the literature describes the esports panoramas the wild west so no one basically speaks to each other there was this famous case of csgo's players that decided to stop attending tournaments because the schedule was too too hard to sustain and then there is less there is not so much open source even if when those major companies basically decide to do an open source operation uh there were a lot of benefit like many games are born from the open source like csgo is a patch of half life though that is a patch from

edit map from warcraft so the question number two is how can the blockchain help so for sure in this decentralization it doesn't need to be a fully decentralized they can decide to switch to a partially decentralized model ownership of assets is evident like if i play a card game and i invest money in the game i don't want those money to be lost one day just because someone decides for it so in a blockchain game if you have the cards and the game stop to be supported you basically can still trade those cards on the secondary market or you can build your own game

so full of possibility one other point i like is the community driven forks so let's say there is a patch update that radically changes your game you can basically decide to switch so that the game can divide so you can still play the old the old version of it considering the landscape yeah mostly um everything is happening on ethereum i mean it's not like defy the percentage is 45 so there are other uh blockchains involved and to be fair you can find games using up to four five blockchains together so they use ethereum for uh trading ercs but they use for other transactions

other layer two solution for example so the ethereum gaming landscape is pretty big i counted more than 130 games but that's just for the play to earn plate awareness scenario so this brings us to the last question so can we make a living by playing a blockchain game so i've analyzed the case of gods unchained this is a game where you basically play card and you can have cars as an nft so these are some data's from this youtuber here copper pitch so he played the games for several months i collected just the last three and he basically was

able to earn a thousand dollars and the way this cost is calculated is by the price of the packages divided by two because you need two cards to fuse them and to make an nft only if you have an nft of course you can trade it so the the weak rate may may not seem so high uh he was playing in the in the highest in the highest tier and with an average of 17 wins which is not really so difficult to achieve it's not like uh professional player is not like a crazily good player um and the the hourly rate is 1.5

dollars per hour but easily you can use like two dollars per hour so you may think the answer can we make a living it's no it's okay we can it's just an hobby and i can earn some money from my nobby which is which is not bad i wish it was like this when i was playing um but the reality is in some countries the early rate is very low like there are some countries with 0.5 dollars per hour and imagine what kinds of work like it's they may be dangerous work you may get injured while if you can technically play this game you can live like a king in a country like that so i think the point

is that with this play toward modern we we are really close like to a financial revolution with x infinity was um in the first page of the singapore newspaper and basically engineers were quitting the their job for uh for playing that game because they were making more money so i really really really look forward to see where the gaming landscape in the esports industry is going thanks so i don't know guys if you have like some questions we can have uh an open discussion thank you [Applause] anyone with the mic

thanks um so you mentioned lots of uh blockchain startups but i have a question what's happening at the large gaming companies because gaming industry also has this like giant giant companies with like billion dollar budgets it seems like they should be interested just to tokenize some of their existing assets but i personally have never heard of any like a huge like gaming company going into blockchain so what's happening for those guys well that's true i mean from the major esports title i personally don't know about not a single one having

gone into the blockchain but simply because at the moment they they don't need it they're making a lot of money they are having a big community when you have 200 million players active per month you don't have really so much problems while what i think will happen in the future is there some uh some startups some companies will develop their game based on the using lots of aspects on the blockchain and some people may migrate there because they see oh wait i can actually leave by playing this so the average person the average hard gamer puts more than 10 000 hours in a game so imagine if you were earning two three four dollars per hour it's actually a lot of money

in your like teenagers not bad i mean i wouldn't be great there okay no more questions i guess thank you thanks guys you