GameCredits partnership?

Can anyone from the Unity team confirm that partnership announcement?

https://gamecredits.com/gamecredits...ring-blockchain-benefits-to-3-billion-gamers/

 

Well the title is clickbait

 

Thank you for the quick reply!

 

So this works on iOS/App Store? And it will work seamlessly side by side with existing payment methods?

 

Three billion unique mobile devices? Isn't that rounding up quite a bit from the 2.4 billion Unity themselves claim?

https://unity3d.com/public-relations

 

Reading article, googling “block chain”...

 

I can answer this.

There's two aspects to this. The GPlay Store and the wagering app.

GPlay Store
The GPlay store will only work with Android. It is essentially an alternative Android store which takes 10% instead of 30% of our revenue. The idea is that developers can incentivise players to reinstall their game from the GPlay store in order to get higher profits. This incentive would usually be discounts on in-app purchases which should attract the whales which provide most of the revenue. For example, You offer players 10% cheaper in-app purchases, while keeping the other 10% bonus for yourself.

At this point, you don't even need to change anything in your game apart from the listed in-App purchase prices.

There will also be a feature exclusive to the GPlay store where developers can buy the Gamecredits currency and perhaps, hide it around the game as a game, promotion or competition.

One thing to mention is that the store will use this GameCredits currency for purchases. It will be mostly seamless as people will pay with a credit card as normal which will automatically buy the correct amount of GAME credits. Developers can then sell these GameCredits or hold on to them as they would increase in value as the platform becomes more popular.

Wagering
The wagering will work on iOS and Android. Furthermore, it should work on games from the Google Play / iOS stores, as well as GPlay.
The currency for wagering will be a token called MGO. It runs on the Ethereum blockchain. You don't really need to understand much about this other than that it is a token who's value can rise and fall. The idea is to make it easier for players from different countries to wager money without constantly converting currencies.

There will be a wagering app external to the game where you can buy the wagering currency with a credit card, or send it to yourself from an Ethereum wallet if you already have some. I think you will be able to find people to wager from this app as well and launch the game ready to play.

Going forward, players will also be able to setup their own structured tournaments. Also, they want to create a marketplace for trading items too.


Edit:
Confirmed by Unity now:
https://unity3d.com/company/public-...deal-unity-technologies-bring-blockchain-game

 

That really didn't answer either question.

Let's try again, I'll be more clear:
1) will this work as a form of payment for in app purchases on iOS apps?
2) if the answer to #1 is yes, can it be used side by side with existing systems? For example if I have a game where people can buy in game currency, like gems or whatever, can it be set up so they can simple chose the form of payment at "check out"?

 

I did answer. The GPlay part is android only. Apple doesn't allow 3rd party stores. So no iOS revenue benefits. Although the wagering will work with Android and apple, it's a separate plugin/app.

 

What are the chances it will continue to work on iOS though? Remember we're talking about Apple here. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they came down on this for some reason. After all using blockchain currency comes across to me as one of the common ways people bypass real money gambling and transaction laws.

 

You're right in some ways. If you're dealing with hackers, money launderes etc. However, when you buy through a regulated exchange, use it on a legit store, that is perfectly fine and accepted to use crypto currencies.

In regards to Apple, yeah they've caused me untold grief submitting a game. And it's true that they may very well not allow this. But that is no yet guaranteed. Google is more likely to allow it and in the end, there is still this 3rd party store which will always be ok.

One thing to note is that from the getgo, they have had a strong focus on non-Western countries like India, Japan, Korea and China which are growing fast and they hope to catch some market share there. So to me it's all a way to get a chance to earn some extra profits and play with new features. If something gets banned in one or two countries thre will still be others that won't. And I haven't lost anything. But if it goes well in even one country, then awesome.

This si all early days. They havent got any products yet. But apparently there will be a lot of stuff released at the end of the year so I look forward to seeing what happens.

 

Perfectly fine and accepted... in the countries that haven't banned it. One of the bigger markets right now for Unity is China and last I was aware they were working to ban cryptocurrency.

 

I guess that's one reason Unity partnered with this company if China is the new big market. Having GPlay store there would give them access to the country and they can market together to make it a nice portal for western devs to be there. Currently, you'd need to use one of the many Chinese app stores which apparently charge huge comissions.

And yes China did recently put a clamp on cryptocurrencies because things were getting out of hand. Lot's of scams apparently. However, they have in the past been interested in it and most people see this is a clamp while they get regulations into place. If they can regulate the exchanges, crypto can't as easily be used for illegal means and just becomes another asset.

See here:
https://www.coinspeaker.com/2017/10...-trading-licensing-exchanges-says-new-report/

 

Why would players move from Google Play to this GPlay store?

And how are players going to find out about it?

Any 'alternative' Android store has always had a minority of players, what makes this store unique for players?

 

Notably, it is 2.4billion devices. Devices!=gamers. Gamers!=paying gamers. Unity only boasts 770 million gamers. So 3 billion gamers is a false claim. What percentage of the 770 million gamers is are:
a) android users?
b) android users who are paying gamers?
c) android users who are paying gamers willing to switch new platform and payment system?

It'll be interesting to see what happens. Right now, their marketplace has a couple of dozen titles and the biggest have a couple of hundred downloads.

 

They will charge 10% comissions, not 30%. So I for example would offer players special items, or just inform them of 10% cheaper in-app purchases on the GPlay store. Whales might find this attractive as they could save a lot of money. What if tehre's a special item you can only buy through the GPlay version plus you get these discounts? It could draw a small but decent amount of players.

Additionally, China offers another opportunity as people there are used to third-party stores and it wouldn't be such a big jump. Especialy if they can access more western games at lower prices. Comissions are really high there.

It's all marginal (at least at the start) but since it doesn't cost me anything to implement, I'm really looking forward to playing with it. It could end up being like a place where people on a budget can download games for a little discount.

As for the press releases claiming 3 billion whatever. Meh, that's just a PR release I don't really care and expect it to be inflated. I am just looking forwadr to more details, and a release so I can look at playing with this.

The current store is still an ugly beta but it will be revamped soon and that should improve its image a lot. In a way, I'd say they announced it too early..

 

If whales cared about saving money they wouldn't exactly be whales.

 

Haha yes some. But others are also non-rich addicts, which is a whole other moral issue of IAPs... Anyway, those who have trouble controlling their spending would probably like to put a small dent in it.

 

One thing I personally find interesting is:

Who is running blockchain nodes?
Etherium at the moment requires 20 gigabytes of disk space to sync up, which makes it... difficult to use.

Meaning if whoever made the framework had a brain, the games will be using some sort of thin client without local copy of the blockchain, and it'll be chatting to some remote node. Which will be wasting disk space maintaining the blockchain itself, and verifying the requests.

So. Who is running those nodes?

 

The games won't require having a copy of the blockchain or anything like that. That's all done by miners.

 

The question was "who is running the nodes?". Which can be rephrased as "who are the miners?".

 

GameCredits has five mining pools listed on their website. I'll just link them here since the site doesn't say much more.

https://gmc.suprnova.cc/
https://hash-to-coins.com/
https://game.poolto.be/
http://gmc.acidpool.com/
https://www.mining-dutch.nl/

https://gamecredits.com/investors/#mining

 

So it is one more attempt to create a new cryptocurrency with a bit of a dressing on top. Sigh.

 

Yeah they got a lot of criticism for this but their decision makes sense to me. The reason they went with their own one was for speed. Bitcoin transactions take too long and are too expensive. Who would use a store where you had to wait upto an hour to confirm a payment and pay $1-2 for the transaction? Their coin uses on and off-chain transactions so it can scale to thousands of tx/s if ncesseary with negligible transaction fees. Usually its 0.

 

Very interesting stuff Phroneo, thank you for that!

 

"scale to thousands" a second or what? They are on the ethereum network if I am not mistaken, so they will likely be doing 10-20 per second...? Maybe I am wrong. Also ethereum is going in the right direction, and I think their scaling solution will be helpful

 

The GameCredits currency has its own blockchain with off-chain capabilities so it can scale to thousands of transaction per second. This is the currency that will be used to purchase apps, or promote them. Certain developer/official tournaments can also pay out in this coin.

MobileGO is a currency for gamers alone to use when setting up tournaments or trading items. You are right that ETH couldn't handle many transactions. They know this so they plan to use off-chain MGO transfers within the ecosystem and only hit the Ethereum network when you move the tokens to and from your account. Many projects are having to do this until ETH can handle more transactions.

 

You keep referring to GameCredits as "they", but you joined on the 25th and, as far as I can tell, have exclusively talked about their stuff. Are you in any way affiliated with them?

Edit: Does this make sense? I thought that the slowdown was in the nature of the system as the chain grows. Having their own is fine in the short term, but won't they run into the same issue in the long term?

 

went to see their stand and talk in Unite, some bit hype-sounding plans, but i believe it can work (if they get people to join..) because:
- they will add cryptomining tool that users can enable, so imagine that your players can earn "free money" to spend on games, this alone would attract users (if there are some good games to spend on)
- their "kickstarter" dev support system plan sounded really nice, i can imagine investing several hundreds on that alone (investors get portion of the profits that game generates later)
- open data system, you can see how much store is generating money, and other data, no secrets or closed systems

*link for more info
http://thegnation.com/ecosystem/

 

No I'm not part of the company. I just think it could be very interesting to try and add to future games. Even a simple multiplayer where people can wager 10 or 50 cents or so would be really popular IMO.

I also like the potential to earn more from selling games there. People struggle to get 2% per year on the bank savings so an extra 10% or so on game revenue would be great.

As for the crowdfunding, I doubt I could get funding for any of my games but I think others would find more potential there.

By the way, Bitcoin is trying to scale but for a while to come, it'll still be less than 10 per second. Not thousands. And transaction fees cost more than game items.