Blockchain games and crypto games: What’s the difference?

Blockchain games and crypto games: What’s the difference?

Well, there are so many differences between these two “classifications” of games. A blockchain game isn’t necessarily a crypto game, but a crypto game can always be classified as a blockchain game. It’s not necessarily a paradox, but it’s leaning towards it very closely.

Let’s try and explain all of the differences and similarities between these two games in this article and make it as accurate as possible.

A crypto game is something that uses cryptocurrencies as its source of the in-game economy. There are usually two understandings to this, but let’s try and bring an example for each of them.

In-game cryptocurrencies

Imagine that it’s the early 2000s and you are playing World of Warcraft. You play your character for a couple of years and finally decide that you’ve had enough of the game and it’s time that you pay attention to something else. However, you don’t want to just leave your character logged out for decades to come without something you can potentially game from it. Blizzard prohibits the sale of accounts and you don’t necessarily want to lurk around subreddits or various other websites trying to sell your account.

Luckily for you, Blizzard had implemented a new crypto policy (obviously this is imaginary). Which would convert your in-game currency into cryptocurrency. What this means is that all of the money you have on your character can potentially be turned into real money.

Depending on how rich you actually are in-game, it could potentially reflect on your monetary gain in real life. Naturally, it would be almost impossible to cash out these coins directly, but it’s possible to do it via Bitcoin. This is usually the path that in-game cryptocurrencies take. But now let’s look at just “local crypto tokens”.

Local crypto tokens

A local crypto token is a cryptocurrency that is not necessarily assigned to the character or the game itself. Meaning that you can’t really generate this currency on a daily basis unless you devote a lot of time to it.

For example, in World of Warcraft, you can “farm” money, meaning you can run around leveling up and generate currency that way, but with “local crypto tokens” it’s usually not the case.

Imagine something like Counter-Strike. The way a local crypto token would be used here is the trade of items in-game. For example, you could trade your weapon skins for local crypto tokens and not have it classified as a sale. Valve would avoid any regulatory overheads, and you won’t have to pay tax on it or anything. It’s an on-platform sale and therefore a legitimate one.

Another great example of “local crypto tokens” is almost any online gaming platform. Although it’s sort of like the dark sheep of the gaming family, it’s still a viable entertainment industry.

Many such online platforms use “local crypto tokens” to allow their players to deposit or withdraw funds. However, there are some like Gunsbet bitcoin casino in Australia that allow players to deposit not necessarily with local tokens, but universal ones such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin.

This is the most common use of cryptos one can find outside of just crypto exchanges and etc. This is where a large volume is circulating.

A blockchain game is something that uses the blockchain technology as its source for a database meaning that cryptocurrencies are not a direct focus here. The blockchain database gives the players much more safety in their online gaming sessions and sometimes even makes it impossible to circumnavigate the guidelines and the rules imposed by the developers.

Let’s try to imagine an MMO once again. Almost every MMO developer will have to make a sizable server in order to accomodate all of the players that will be signing up for their game.

The server would most likely be located in a centralized area in the developer’s office and would have a singular database where everything would be stored.

Remember that +100 magic flame sword that you got yesterday? That’s on this server.

Remember that new mage you made and got a magic stick yesterday? That’s on this server as well.

What the blockchain system would do in a sense, is diversity this information on its server and make it almost impossible to attack or damage it completely. The server would be distributed among several devices, sometimes even the device of the player themselves.

Any potential hacker would need to attack every single server location one by one, breaking into which would be almost impossible. By the time he or she would access the second node, the first would have been fixed and all of the data recovered.

It’s a much more secure approach to storing lots and lots of information for an MMO or any other game for that matter.

That’s pretty much all the difference between these two types of games. Naturally, it’s always possible to combine them together and have a secure and “profitable” game to play at all times.

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