How new blockchain protocols can solve gaming industry's bottlenecks

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Introduction




Gaming industry is a huge potential market that many big companies in not only gaming industry but also other industries show their interests. Today, the video game market has an estimated value of 152 billion USD. According to a research, the demand for video games is predicted to be worth more than $90 billion by 2020, up from almost $78.61 billion in 2017. Recognizing the potential of this industry, many blockchain-based gaming start-ups are created. However, everything is not in pink while there are still challenges in scalability or exchanging game items due to lack of trusted platform. Why does this happen? It is because of lack of infrastructure burden, developer-friendly tools and very difficult process to participate. Most of traditional gaming devs have to begin by learning a programming language they are not very familiar with or must get used to a brand new UI that they have never interacted before. Understanding the problem, NEAR Protocol, a sharded, developer-friendly, proof-of-stake public blockchain, built by a world-class team that has built some of the world's only sharded databases at scale, was born to resolve these issues.

Bottlenecks in blockchain-based gaming industry

Scalability

Scalability many not be an issue in traditional gaming industry but it is really an obstacle which all blockchain-based gaming companies need to overcome. An illustration of this is in 2017 when the whole crypto industry is booming, CryptoKitties, at that time, with its incredible affect made the Ethereum network congested since everyone want to participate in this addicted dApp. At the time of this article, although Ethereum network is in phase 2 of its experiment, however, there is still a long way to their official launch (approximately 2 more years until we can truly use ETH 2.0). But we do not need to be worried, NEAR Protocol - with their extraordinary technical teams who has shipped sharded systems before in production settings, is doing exactly what ETH 2.0 gonna do. What does that mean? It means that we can enjoy the scalability advantages of NEAR which called “Nightshade” in the most secured and decentralized way instead of waiting for 2 more years with ETH 2.0 and blockchain start-ups should be the ones who are most excited with what NEAR Protocol can brings to them. More than that, NEAR Protocol also built an ETH-NEAR Rainbow Bridge in case users want to switch from NEAR to ETH and vice versa.



Threats from hackers



According to a research from Trend Micro shows that gamers are favorite targets of hackers as well as they are the most vulnerable target. Gamers are often potential victims because most of them are economically stable people, in other word, rarely a poor person has plenty of time to play games. Gamers are usually lured by phishing emails, such as requests to complete game surveys, account information security or filling the form to win games items. That way, they can hack into your credit card or take away your personal information. In 2017, The Verge discovered that a Chinese company hacked Xbox accounts and then sold users' information on the black market. What's worse is that they even started their actions in 2015, and Microsoft has absolutely no solution for this issue. With issues mentioned above, it is even more difficult for gamers who spend their time and money in order to build high-level gaming characters and hunting precious items with the purpose of selling or exchanging. However, this is a completely different story if a gaming production wants to build their games on NEAR Protocol. Because NEAR is a blockchain protocol, hence, they has their own tokens and network, meaning that every gaming user’s transactions must go through the network and it can be seen by anyone, this helps to not only prevent hackers but also make the money laundering process from gaming criminal even more impossible. In addition, validators is not always the same for each shard in NEAR. More specifically, they will be rotated daily with the purpose of adding more layer for the security of the network. NEAR Protocol is also a truly decentralized community-run cloud so that any changes in the network must meet sufficient quorum from network participants to be accepted no matter it is critical or not. This help to prevent bad intentions from malicious network participants (i.e. gaming hackers).

Coding difficulty for developers



Blockchain is a new industry compared with the other traditional ones and it is unpopular for most of developers out there. There are many blockchain protocols become ghost chains after launch because they produce too many different things that solve different problems, some even invent their whole new programming language. As a result, noone understand and ready to learn their own code. It can be too complicated or too hard to learn. That is the reason why the vision of NEAR Protocol is to bring the most comfortable and convenient user experience for their developer community including gaming developers who is ready to build on NEAR. In detail, if dApp developers wants to build on the protocol, TypeScript or any other language which compiles to Web Assembly (Wasm) is enough for their adventure with NEAR. More interestingly, developers can also receive rewards for their efforts since they can set their own fees everytime their smart-contract is used. This will help to open the whole new way gaming devlopers can take advantages to work more efficiently.

Unlimited potential of gaming industry with the appearance of NEAR Protocol

The turnaround in investing in the video game world is a sign of the growth in both revenue and the number of players, for a strong expansion in both engagement and geographical of this industry. This market is predicted to reach $250 million by 2023, it is no exaggeration to affirm that the diversity of developers around the world has realized its potential, while helping to build this industry becomes a complete ecosystem. For that reason, we can clearly see the need of solid protocol like NEAR Protocol where will be the best place for all gaming developers around the world freely widen their creativity with unlimited gain potential.



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