Google’s new Gaming Platform, Future of Streaming Services and What it Means for the Token Economy
Last week was marked by an event of a great significance to the game industry. At the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, revealed what the company was working on for the past couple of years. Announcing Stadia, a new game streaming service that aims to change the gaming industry the way we know it by revolutionizing the current environment in which people play games. Games would be built to run on Stadia’s cloud platform, which will be able to stream them to players at 4K at 60 frames per second.
And the big question here, as it is yet to be announced, is how would this be monetized or even tokenized, as other competitors, such as EA, already did. More light on this topic is expected to be revealed on Google’s annual developer conference ( Google I/O ) in May, but for now, here are some examples on how token economy could lead the way to fairer and faster distribution.
Monetizing subscription-based services
We all use services that are subscription based. We pay the full amount every time period. But we all have zero flexibility when we decide to use the service. Of course, there are a few options, like standard, premium or pro, although the real pros of flexibility go way beyond this archaic business model tricks. It goes all the way up to freedom and fairness. Two aspects that modern world somehow lack. And that is why the blockchain technology was designed in the first place. To give financial independence, to be flexible, and quite frankly — just to be fair.
As the technology advanced, in the foreseeable future B2B model would be underlying by machine-to-machine transactions. Lack of adequate infrastructure is the main reason why this was not a global phenomenon. At least up to this moment.
Microtransactions are an important infrastructure
With the creation and the advancement of blockchain technology microtransactions have never been so close to real implementation in the world, and not just a concept. Here are few keynotes why microtransactions are such a huge treat that hopefully would lead to the quest to a fairer financial system.
What if we could pay just for what we really use, or the so-called Pay-as-you-go model. Heavy user? OK, nothing wrong with that, chances are you would be comfortable to pay the full price. But what if you just watch a movie, or listen to 10 hours of music per month, only while training in the gym, and you need some outer boost.
A fairer distribution of taxes
Drawing the bigger picture is where the modern government comes to attention. Paying taxes, that are poorly distributed.
Imagine a person that goes to the local library quite often, but does not really use a car. It would be great if the taxes go directly to support this library and surrounding infrastructure and the sidewalks on both sides of the road that lead to his home, and not to the actual road lane. This, of course, needs a huge tracking and IoT is here to help, again not without Blockchain technology, which is playing a huge role in terms of identity, privacy, and security.
Coming Soon
Nowadays we do not even need to imagine this scenario for our future, because it is already right in front of us. Just the technology needs time to adapt to common policies and to get better UX/UI.
Such examples are all around us, like digital land, tokenization of real estate, art, etc. combined with the advancement of IoT protocols and policies it is reasonable to expect to see digitalization of classical services and mechanics in the upcoming decade.
Bottom line — tokenization is here to stay and it is for the better — better customer experience, faster and unstoppable transactions, innate legal support and fair distribution, and micropayments are the tool that would make this possible. Period.
Our guest author Krum Panchev is an architect by education who is keenly interested in the startup and tech world. Gaming, Blockchain, and Crowdfunding are three of his favorite topics. He describes himself as Naval Ravikant & Nassim Taleb admirer, and Sam Altman & Elon Musk fan ツ
