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Blockchain and the evolution of business models in the game industry

With the introduction of blockchain-based assets for games comes the possibility of entirely new business models and innovative development.
The first computer games were developed in the late 20th century with the sole purpose of…

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With the introduction of blockchain-based assets for games comes the possibility of entirely new business models and innovative development.

The first computer games were developed in the late 20th century with the sole purpose of entertaining their audience. One of the first goals was to distract players from their routine work and provide them access to a fantasy world. Very soon, games began to compete for users' time against traditional forms of entertainment, such as movies, circuses, theater performances, zoos, etc.

Planet Earth entered the new millennium with a population of over 6 billion people, and the forecast is that this number will reach 8 billion as early as 2023. If we assume that computer games will cease to be an alternative to work and become complementary to it, there will be 4 billion gamers in the world by then.

Not surprisingly, the traditional boundaries between games, media, sports and communication are rapidly disappearing, creating new business partnerships and causing more and more mergers and acquisitions around the world.

The still-active virtual world Second Life, which represented a first attempt at a portal to the metaverse with its own in-platform virtual currency, was an important example of this process between 2003 and 2006, during its most rapid period of growth. Players in many countries quit their jobs and dedicated 100% of their time to the virtual world.

But why is the use of blockchain in games causing a real revolution in the gaming industry? That is what this article seeks to answer.

The gaming markets

According to data from mid-2021, there were 3.2 billion people playing computer games, and as a report by Newzoo states, the global gaming revenues in 2021 were about $180.3 billion — 20% more than before the pandemic began in 2019.

Digital distribution channels are responsible for most of this revenue. Mobile games act as the main growth engine for the games industry, driving this segment to $93.2 billion dollars.

The game development industry has experienced a profound transformation over the past five years. With the emergence of mobile app stores and digital distribution platforms, even smaller studios have gained the ability to create games for the global market.

China remains the largest regional segment in terms of both revenue and number of players, accounting for more than a quarter of all sales. The Asia-Pacific region as a whole holds 55% of all players and offers the highest profits and fastest growth rates.

The introduction of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and blockchain, has become a major trend in the market. In recent years, numerous blockchain-enabled gaming apps and services have emerged, and the number of such projects promises to cause a boom in the market by 2022.

The evolution of business models in the games industry

Pay-to-play (P2P) model

From the 1970s until the 2000s, the most prevalent business model for the games industry was "pay-to-play." In this model, development studios and publishers generate revenue from initial game sales and, in some cases, subscriptions. Collaborations with advertisers for in-game ads were few and far between.

In this model, players have little or no opportunity to extract value from games, except the satisfaction and enjoyment gained from the in-game experience.

Free-to-play (F2P) model

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the “free-to-play” gaming model gained traction. This model was once considered a disastrous business model that would, at best, bring in lower revenues for a given game and, at worst, cannibalize the entire gaming industry. However, it has instead proven to be the best way to monetize, as well as being a main reason behind the cultural rise of games.

In the free-to-play model, games are offered to players at no upfront cost. In this type of model, in-game purchases (items and upgrades that improve features in the game) and ads make up the vast majority of the publishing studios' revenues. Streaming and esports services act as monetization levers for players, while allowing "elite" players to receive rewards.

A perfect example of how some of these free-to-play business models have become successful is Fortnite. The game, launched in July 2017, generated over $5 billion in revenue in its first year of production. In addition, its userbase climbed to approximately 80 million monthly active users in 2018.

Play-to-earn (P2E) model

The “play-to-earn” model is exactly what the name suggests: A model where users can play and earn tokens or crypto while playing. This model has a very powerful psychological incentive, because it combines two activities that have driven humanity since the beginning of time: reward and entertainment.

The main idea in P2E is that players are rewarded as they invest more time and more effort in the game, and thus become part of the in-game economy (tokenomics), creating value for themselves, for other participants in the game ecosystem, and also for the developers. They receive an incentive/reward for their participation and playing time in the form of digital assets with potential appreciation over time.

Note that the use of blockchain technology in such assets has brought scarcity to digital assets in games, which can take the form of NFTs and can represent absolutely anything from characters like the kittens in CryptoKitties to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) or Ether (ETH).

Related: The Metaverse, play-to-earn and the new economic model of gaming

Along these lines, the key component in this model is to give players "ownership" over certain "digital assets" in the game, allowing them to increase their value by actively participating. This is where blockchain technology has become decisive for gaming business models.

Many concepts come from traditional games

The blockchain-based gaming industry is still in its early stages and it is still centered around many concepts coming from traditional gaming. NBA Top Shot, for example, is building on the “collect and trade model” that has prevailed in baseball cards and other collectibles for decades.

Axie Infinity, currently the most famous blockchain-based game, uses the “breed and battle” game model that Pokémon launched in the 1990s.

Related: How blockchain technology might bring triple-A games to metaverses

Sorare, on the other hand, a game in which players buy and trade soccer cards and build competing soccer teams, is based on the “recruit and compete” model. Similarly, virtual worlds like Decentraland and Somnium Space are immersing people in alternative realities, like Second Life and The Sims before them.

Thus, although many games that use blockchain technology (such as The Sandbox, Gods Unchained and Star Atlas) often fall into the same categories as games that do not use such technology, the most important feature that distinguishes them from their counterparts in the traditional market is the use of blockchain-based cryptocurrency support.

Overview of blockchain gaming

Advantages of blockchain games for players

With the introduction of blockchain technology, native game assets go to global, non-permitted blockchain platforms, rather than being tied up and locked in the particular game's platform or in local environments controlled by video game development companies. We've talked about this before, when we covered the role of blockchain in NFTs in this column.

Here, it is important to highlight how blockchain technology has enabled digital assets, such as nonfungible tokens, to be interoperable and immediately viewable across dozens of different wallet providers, tradable on other gaming platforms and required in various virtual worlds of the Metaverse. And interoperability, in turn, has extended the negotiability of digital assets by enabling their free trade on other gaming platforms, thanks to blockchain technology. This puts users in direct ownership of their in-game items, giving them full and irrevocable control over their use.

That is, blockchain game players can access NFT marketplaces and crypto-active brokers and extract value from their in-game experiences by buying and trading digital assets obtained in games, 24/7, globally. In addition, tokenization of in-game assets opens up numerous other opportunities.

Related: Ready Player Earn: Where NFT gaming and the virtual economy coincide

The decentralized finance marketplace is a place where some players can put their acquired in-game assets to yield. Platforms like Yield Guild Games facilitate, for example, the lending and borrowing activities of in-game assets, so that players who do not have the initial capital needed to purchase in-game items can, through DeFi, participate in a given game by ceding a portion of the monetization and their earnings to “in-game item lenders.”

The advantage of blockchain games for developers

In addition to increasing monetization opportunities for gamers, the use of blockchain-based assets can also be beneficial for game developers.

Under the current structure of in-game item exchange, the practice known as “gold mining” has become prevalent. Gold mining involves players selling accounts or game “coins” on dark markets or over-the-counter markets, limiting secondary market monetization opportunities for developers and making players vulnerable to fraud.

With the expansion of marketplaces for digital assets obtained in blockchain games, developers can obtain information about the trading volumes of these assets and encode royalties into NFTs, so that with each subsequent sale, they receive a portion of the sale price as a royalty fee. This represents a real evolution in the way intellectual property and copyrights are thought of in the digital world.

The game industry and the property dispute

Games that use blockchain are fundamentally different from traditional games because of the way they approach ownership. Blockchain games give players full control over the digital assets they earn or acquire through their participation in the games.

In traditional games, even though players pay real money for their digital assets, they can no longer access them if the server is down. That is, in traditional games, the money and assets remain the property of the publisher or developer.

Ultimately, blockchain game players retain full ownership of their digital assets, allowing them to trade them freely with other players, sell them for real money, and potentially use them in other games or virtual worlds in the Metaverse.

Related: Nonfungible tokens from a legal perspective

The trend in the games industry is towards the adoption of blockchain in games as a path of no return, and at the moment, the P2E model is the driver of this adoption. However, over time, the use of blockchain in games will likely span a variety of use cases beyond the play-to-earn model. This is because the technology enables a myriad of combinations and incentives.

Against this backdrop, it's no wonder that, in the last four months alone, hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into blockchain or NFT-centric games, with investors allocating large amounts of funds to startups that, in turn, are looking for expert developers to build their teams.

Parallel to this, governments are already considering taxing the profits made by the more than two million players of Axie Infinity, currently the most popular game on blockchain and using the P2E model.

What about you? Would you invest your time to compete and be rewarded with digital assets in a game, including it as work experience on your resume?

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Tatiana Revoredo is a founding member of the Oxford Blockchain Foundation and is a strategist in blockchain at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Additionally, she is an expert in blockchain business applications at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the chief strategy officer of The Global Strategy. Tatiana has been invited by the European Parliament to the Intercontinental Blockchain Conference and was invited by the Brazilian parliament to the public hearing on Bill 2303/2015. She is the author of two books: Blockchain: Tudo O Que Você Precisa Saber and Cryptocurrencies in the International Scenario: What Is the Position of Central Banks, Governments and Authorities About Cryptocurrencies?

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Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…

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Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

Credit: source: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.

The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.

Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.

“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”

Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.

Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.

The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.

Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.

“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”

The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.

Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”

Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.

“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”


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There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

More Travel:

According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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The next pandemic? It’s already here for Earth’s wildlife

Bird flu is decimating species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss.

I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.

I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.

This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.

How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.

This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.

This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.

H5N1 originated on a Chinese poultry farm in 1997. ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

The first signs

Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.

We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.

Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.

Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.

Unfortunately, our warnings were correct.

A roving sickness

Two decades on, bird flu is killing species from the high Arctic to mainland Antarctica.

In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.

Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.

The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.

Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.

At the crossroads

Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.

Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.

It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.

Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.

Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.

A colony of king penguins.
Remote penguin colonies are already threatened by climate change. AndreAnita/Shutterstock

How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.

To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.

Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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