During a recent sit-down interview with David Haddad, the president of Warner Bros Interactive. Dean Takahashi and he had a somewhat cursory glance at blockchain and its potential within gaming.
The same can’t be said with our discussion with William Quigley, CEO of OPSkins and WAX.
It’s with WAX that we can see the kind of disruptive potential that businesses using blockchain can accomplish.
Especially when those same companies are intent upon providing for a post-retail world.
Sneakers as the first test
Its most recent example of this is the company’s partnership with RTFKT and Faze, which took something like a sneaker brand and brought a new spin to it. As Quigley explains.
“What’s interesting to me is creating this digital/augmented reality copy of that shoe, putting that onto a token, and allowing for that token to be freely traded against the physical sneaker. You’ve basically taken that sneaker, and turned it into a stock certificate.”
The whole system of e-commerce, thanks to decentralized or distributed solutions, has the potential of being flipped on its head. Especially when real-world assets can be stored and validated in an objective way.
The current system we have is, for many of us internationally, restrictive. whether because of shipping costs, or being unable to provide a service to a particular country.
There has yet to be a system that it well and truly internationalized, and this is where decentralized entities have a sought-after space.
For someone to send an asset to someone in another country peer-to-peer, “the shipping costs would be way too high,” Quigley explains. “Which is why these marketplaces typically cater to just the country that they’re in.”
Between a geographically restrictive and time-consuming process, we see in mainstream e-commerce. Tokenizing physical assets allowed for borders to be crossed without any friction.
But for a record number of transactions of this same asset to take place that would simply be unfathomable in a conventional sense.
A real, digital, interoperable use case for retail and blockchain for gaming
One of the things that we, as a blockchain gaming community, have been waiting for is a project that can serve as a real use case.
One that proves more than enough to appeal to a mass market of users and draw in major companies.
For the most part, however, as individuals like Brett Saylor (Founder of Forte) and Randy Saaf (Lucid Sight) have argued.
These same centralized entities provide games that function within a siloed environment, while its economy is wholly central and controlled.
The chief reason why companies hesitate in applying blockchain? A lack of use cases, and underlying rhetoric that a decentralized/distributed economy will not be able to generate profit for the game and company in general.
Between both OPSkins and WAX, the ultimate aim is to provide this real use case, for users and major developers alike.
Specifically, this will be the strategy once the full WAX blockchain launches at the end of June, as Quigley explains.
“At the moment, game developers have been on the fence for some time about blockchain.” Quigley continues.
“They’re thinking ‘how does this add value to our model?’ We will allow them to convert their game into e-commerce stores.”
Simplicity, Quigley further elaborates, is the key to what will compel companies to leverage blockchain:
“Any time that you give a company an incremental revenue source without needing to change any necessary behaviours, it provides a welcome additional revenue stream for them.”
Be sure to check out both OPSkins and WAX. Especially as the latter counts down to the introduction of its full blockchain solution.
Join us at Blockchain Games Connects Hong Kong – 17-18 July 2019.
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