Virtual Currency Games

Every little boy’s dream (and many adult men) is to make a living by video games getting closer to reality. The recent release of HunterCoin and the upcoming VoidSpace, games that reward players with digital currency instead of virtual princesses or gold stars, point to a future in which someone’s position on the leaderboard can be rewarded in dollars, pounds, euros and yen.

The story of a millionaire broker (virtual)…

Digital currencies are slowly maturing, both in terms of functionality and financial infrastructure, allowing them to be used as a reliable alternative to non-virtual paper currency. Although Bitcoin, the first and most famous cryptocurrency, was created in 2009, virtual currency forms have been used in video games for more than 15 years. 1997 Ultima Online was the first notable attempt to incorporate a large-scale virtual economy into play. Players could collect gold coins, performing missions, fighting monsters, as well as finding and spending treasures on armor, weapons or real estate. It was the first incarnation of the virtual currency in the sense that it existed only in the game, although it reflected the real world economy, as the currency Ultima experienced inflation due to game mechanics, which caused an infinite number of monsters. kill and therefore gold coins to collect.

Released in 1999, Ever’uest has moved the virtual currency game one step further by allowing players to share virtual goods with each other in the game, and although the game developer is also prohibited from selling virtual items to each other on eBay. In a real phenomenon that was amusingly explored in Neil Stevenson’s novel, Reamde in 2011, Chinese gamers or ‘golden farmers’ were invited to play Ever’uest and other similar full-time games in order to accumulate experience points to improve their characters. Bring. making them more powerful and in demand. These characters will then be sold on eBay to Western players who don’t want or couldn’t spend hours improving their characters.

How to get money for mining asteroids …

Today, the ability to generate non-virtual money in secondary-design video games requires that a player use unauthorized channels to redeem his virtual loot, or possess some degree of creativity or business acumen in the game, in the real world. that can be exchanged for cash. This may change with the advent of video games created from the ground up on the basis of popular digital currency platforms. The approach used by HunterCoin is to ‘gemify’ what is usually a fairly technical and automated process of creating a digital currency. Unlike the real world currencies created by the central bank in the printing process, digital currencies are created by “mining” users. The basic source code of a particular digital currency with which it can work is called a blockchain, a decentralized online book that records all transactions and exchanges between people. Since the digital currency is nothing more than intangible data, it is more vulnerable to fraud than a physical currency because it is possible to duplicate a unit of currency by causing inflation or changing the value of a transaction after it has been done for personal gain. To prevent this from happening, the blockchain is “checked” by volunteers or “miners” who check the validity of each transaction that has been made to make sure that the data has not been altered with special equipment and software. This is an automatic process for the software of miners, although it is an extremely long process, requiring a lot of processing power from their computer. To reward the miner for verifying the transaction, blockchain releases a new unit of digital currency and thus rewards them as an incentive to continue servicing the network, thereby creating a digital currency. Because it may take days or even years before a person can successfully mine a coin, user groups combine their resources into a ‘mining pool’, using the collective computing power of their computers to extract parts more quickly.

The future of video games?

Although HunterCoin and VoidSpace are still in their infancy in terms of quality, it is an interesting indicator of what the next game evolution might be. MMORPG is now seen as a means of modeling disease outbreaks, as the player’s response to an unintentional plague reflected the recorded and difficult to simulated aspects of human behavior in real outbreaks. It can be assumed that in-game virtual savings may eventually be used as models to test economic theories and develop responses to mass chess based on observations of how players use real-value digital currencies. It is also a good test of functionality and the potential use of digital currencies that promise to go beyond simple exchange tools, such as in exciting areas of personal digital property. Meanwhile, players now have the means to transfer hours spent in front of the screen into digital currency and then into dollars, pounds, euros or yen.

But before you quit your day-to-day work…

… it is worth mentioning the current exchange rates. It is estimated that the player can easily reimburse his initial registration fee of 1005 HunterCoin (HUC) for participating in HunterCoin in the game within 1 day. Currently, HUC cannot be directly exchanged for U.S. dollars, it must be converted into a more established digital currency, such as bitcoin. At the time of writing, the HUC exchange rate for bitcoins (BC) was 0.00001900, while the BC exchange rate against the US dollar was $384.24. 1 HUC, traded in British Columbia and then in U.S. dollars, excluding transaction fees, will be equal to … 0.01 U.S. dollars. This does not mean that if a player becomes more experienced, he will not be able to create his own team of virtual coin hunters and possibly use bot programs that will automatically play the game under the guise of another player, and coins will also benefit them. but I think it’s safe to say that even such an effort can only realistically enough at this stage lead to sufficient change for daily McDonalds.