Play, Earn, and Own: The Future of Blockchain Gaming

Salon Accelerator took place in New York City last month, and the conference was a hotbed for innovation.

We saw some pretty interesting things, including robot boxing and high-tech video games.

Now Blockchain Gaming incorporates blockchain technology into video games, and players can own, trade, and sell in game items which are.

NFTs or tokens on a blockchain blockchain gaming is reshaping the industry by giving players more control, new ways to earn and increase trust in digital economies.

Well, joining me this morning is Paul Thomas, founder of Somnia.

Paul, good morning.

Thank you so much for joining us.

So for viewers who may not be familiar, tell us about blockchain gaming.

Yeah, so blockchain gaming basically puts all of the digital assets and ownership that players normally have within Web 2 platforms on Web 3, so on blockchain.

This means that players can freely trade that outside of the game.

They can actually be inside a game, play, win items, and then monetize those outside, which is quite revolutionary in the games industry.

Normally when you put money into a game, you can never get that out again.

But now with web 3 gaming you have the ability to put money in and get money out.

Um, so that's, I think, a massive revolution.

I think the other thing is you can start to monetize the gaming data in different forms or fashions.

So one of the examples in our ecosystem is people are putting whenever someone wins a game on the blockchain, then people are gambling on that as well.

So I think it adds different kinds of gameplay to traditional video games as well.

And Paul, do you think that blockchain gaming is part of the future of Web 3?

I mean, definitely for me it's the games industry essentially goes through kind of step changes of adoption when new platforms or new business models come about and I think ultimately what web 3 enables is a brand new business model in the games industry and we saw this before with things like free.

Play with things like box copy sales, and I think this play and earn style mechanism that you can do with web 3 gaming, I think is a whole new business model which basically opens up a brand new set of players and a brand new way to attract players and retain players, which I think is going to be a massive driver for blockchain at the end of the day in the web 3 industry.

And as you've highlighted, gaming is a growing industry and at the same time, more young girls and women are playing.

So how will gaming communities like those in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Rocket League benefit from blockchain gaming?

So ultimately there are a few different things here.

The first major one is it enables interoperability across those experiences.

So today what you tend to find is consumers kind of cluster around, say, one game like Fortnite or like Call of Duty, and they're kind of stuck in that game and they never move out because all of the hours they put it in their assets are locked there, their progression is all locked there.

What web 3 gaming will enable is you as a consumer to go to one of these games, spend a lot of time, get a lot of progression, do well, but that progression isn't locked in that game.

That could be transferred to other games within the ecosystem, which again I think is a huge value proposition to players and ultimately enable a massive set of people to come on board and not feel like they're locked into one singular game and therefore spread the gaming ecosystem more broadly.

And I think another thing that's very important is it opens up that new monetization mechanism, and I'm sort of a big believer in this future world where you, as a gamer playing Fortnite could actually earn a living wage from getting items and being good at that video game with people also potentially sponsoring it as well.

So I think that's going to be a huge differentiator for those kind of major video games that enables people to play and earn.

OK, Paul, well, we will have to leave it there.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot.