Web 3.0 is the next era of monetization for Games.

Gaming started from a Cathode-Ray oscilloscope in a lab by William "Higin" botham on October 18, 1958, called Tennis for Two. Fun fact, We named our protocol "Higin," and I (founder of Higin) share the same birthday as Higinbotham.

Now gaming industry revenue is more significant than movie box office and music combined!

Earning from games.

The first opportunity in earning from gaming is to build the game itself. It was the industry's first opportunity to monetize.

The scale of modern-day games got bigger and scaled much broader. Example: World of Warcraft, made by over 6000+ employees, generated over $10B+ in revenue since it launched over a decade ago.

Eports is competitive gaming, where people compete to win a championship similar to actual sports.

Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf 18 year old who won 3 Million dollars by winning the 2019 Fortnite world cup. (16 at the time of winning). That's 50% more than Tiger woods (professional golf player) in 2019 golf Masters.

The average salary of NA league of legends professional players is $320,000. This is made possible by viewership. 99 Million+ tuned in to watch the finals, broadcasted online in 19 different languages across 30 other platforms, including ESPN. At the staples center, which hosted the world championship, the tickets for the entire stadium sold out in less than one hour.

Another form of making revenue is through streaming. Which player broadcast their gameplay through platforms like Twitch, Youtube. The most famous streamer in the world is "Ninja." Ninja earns more than $500,000+ per month from just his fans.

A recap, this is how people earn a living in games today:

1. Make games.
2. Professional esports.
3. Streaming.

But even with these new opportunities. To make it in the industry is still incredibly tough. For example, the League of legends has 100 Million active players. In the entire world, there are just under 1000 professional players. That's just 0.001% who make it to pro leagues.

On Twitch, the largest streaming platform. There are more than 3 million active streamers. Of that, only 0.33% of players have a twitch partner program making a full-time income.

Even with these opportunities, the opportunity to make a living doing what you love doesn't exist. Gaming has always been at the bleeding edge of new technologies, PCs, the internet, AI, cloud computing, Smartphones, and social networks. Blockchain technology will open up the next significant chapter in gaming. It's not going to be a computing revolution, and it'll be an economic revolution. Blockchain perfectly aligns with the digital nature of games.

Democratizing earning from games

1. Digital ownership: Blockchain allows for a person to own a digital asset truly. People don't need to depend on financial institutions, third parties to verify the ownership.
2. Provenance: Blockchain allows for the record of the complete history of an asset from its origins.
3. Peripheral markets: A safe way to do peer-peer transactions without depending on a third party.

Applications of Blockchain on gaming:

1. Convert digital purchases to Assets.

For example, if a player buys this limited edition costume and no longer uses it. If they want to give it to someone else, they can't because they own a license to a digital copy of this asset. But if this batman costume were on a public costume, it would be equivalent to going to a Halloween shop where you could gift it to a friend who missed the event, sell or trade it to someone else. It's entirely up to the player.

Blockchain, when applied to gaming, will unlock absolute ownership for assets and create residual value for virtual items, and in some cases, turn digital purchases into investments.

2. Provenance

Todd MacFarlane, a famous comic book artist. He bought a crown jewel of memorabilia in the baseball community. The exact baseball that Mark McGwire hit for a 70th home run. A monumental event in baseball. This baseball, which should cost around $20–100, is worth $2.6 million because of its verified provenance.

From Fortnite's world champion Bugha, imagine if someone could own his exact costume, gear that was used when he won the world cup. This would unlock multiple provenance verified assets that benefit the player, game developer, and community.

3. Capture value:

Blockchain can capture value in peripheral markets. Players are buying and selling their entire game accounts right now because they can't own and sell individual items.

Below is a picture of a gamer who posted on Twitter. It's a stripe dashboard. This user goes and plays world of warcraft for ten days. Creating a new account, getting the right gear that he knows will be valuable, and selling the entire account with login details to other players.

Over three years, he made $471,981 doing this. Probably a lot more if he drove a uber or participated in the gig economy.

This market is massive. No one knows who big it is since it's in the periphery. Most importantly, game developers hate this. It creates security vulnerability in the game, a customer support nightmare and, they don't see a single penny of the transactions.

Blockchain applied inside the game would unlock and solve all the problems. Players would get a safe play to buy and sell; service providers will have a customer base, game developers configure smart contracts and take a cut of every transaction. Most importantly, they could rely on modern-day cryptography technology as well as the billions invested in blockchain infrastructure. Together these aspects of digital ownership, provenance, and peer-peer to the marketplace will create community economics.

This is what we are building at Higin. All the technology that game developers, esport players, and streamers to add blockchain to their existing millions of players/fans and create brand new experiences from the ground up. Similar to Linkedin. Linkedin was built on web 2.0 tools for job seekers. Linkedin started tools like user profiles for users to express themselves and connect with other people in the community and job recruiters, Linkedin pages for companies to express themselves and connect with talent, Linkedin jobs for companies to find and hire other people. Linkedin has built an infrastructure platform hidden inside the social network, helping millions of people progress in their careers.

There are 2.4 billion gamers in the world today. Higin will help them become creators, entrepreneurs, and service providers, and best of all, they don't need to be an experienced game developer; they don't need to be a world-class professional esport player, need not be a celebrity, they need to do what they do, be a Gamer.

If you are a game developer, esports player, or streamer and would like to partner or connect with us, please text us at partner@higin.in or join our discord. We would love to connect with as many as possible and learn how we can build better to make gaming a viable career option, improve financial inclusion and wealth distribution.