WAX exec: Gaming industry will have a 'blockchain-connected' future

As blockchain slowly finds its way into the video game industry, industry veterans and executives at WAX, the NFT blockchain, see more connections between games and blockchain networks in the future.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, WAX Head of Publishing David Kim and WAX Studios Head of Games Michael Rubinelli shared their thoughts on NFTs, the Metaverse, and blockchain games.

According to Kim, despite low search interest on Google, engagement with games, metaverses, and NFTs has not stopped. “On the WAX Blockchain, we’ve seen the number of sale transactions start doubling in Q4 2021 and have remained high since then,” he said.

"I'm not sure if the 'hype' will pick up, but we believe that in the long run, interest and participation in the Metaverse and NFTs will grow indefinitely as utility increases and security concerns are removed."

On the other hand, when asked about the future of the play-to-earn (P2E) game model, Rubinelli compared the implementation of P2E to the adoption of free-to-play and microtransactions within games. The executive, who has been in the gaming industry for more than 20 years, believes a similar pattern is playing out.

“We firmly believe that in the next few years, most games will have some earning elements. Most of them will be connected to the blockchain, but not fully run on the blockchain.”

In the 2021 report released by the Blockchain Gaming Alliance, a survey showed that when asked how likely the blockchain industry is to utilize blockchain in the next two years, many respondents had the same sentiments as WAX executives. the opinion of.

Talking about the challenges facing blockchain games, Rubinelli mentioned that scalability remains a major issue. "Right now, the biggest challenge is the lack of scalability for most blockchains," he said.

The gaming veteran noted that Layer 2 solutions cannot scale unless they are "100% dedicated to a single game, like Axie Infinity's Ronin." He also mentions an incident where "Polygon had an outage" while Sunflower Farmer's user base was growing.

Regarding esports, David Kim mentioned that most games on the WAX platform are "too simple to adapt to esports." However, the WAX exec noted that there are some games in development that could be adapted for esports.

“There are currently multiple esports-focused blockchain-connected games in development. This includes Hearthstone-like card battle games like Skyweaver, war games like Hodlgod, and team-based First-person shooters like The Forge Arena."

Kim pointed out that esports games take more time to develop. According to Kim, “Alien Worlds”, “Splinterlands” and “Axie Infinity” have only been released for nine months, and blockchain games have attracted a large number of players. "You can't develop the kind of complex game mechanics that esports requires in such a short period of time," he added.