Gamertoken: What Is It, And Why Does It Matter

Gamertoken is a name that, as of today, July 24th, has been making significant waves in the gaming industry. It claims to be a digital marketplace through which gamers can be rewarded by their digital actions with unique in-game items designed by players, for players.

And yet, it also advertises to game creators, saying that they can use Gamertoken’s service to supply them with a new stream of revenue. It even advertises to publishers, claiming to make payments faster, safer, and more secure than ever.

While one might look to Gamertoken’s official website for information on how this service will actually works, that site offers little in the way of concrete information. In place of actual details are flowery lines about how this service will “empower gamers” to “take control of their digital possessions”.

For some reason, the service seems to make the actual information on purpose and function a bit harder to find than it should be, which can be annoying to those who don’t know what to expect from the marketplace. But we’ve dug deep to break down the barriers and get to the real meat of what this new service will offer.

And without further ado, here’s everything you need to know about Gamertoken.

Gamertoken is a new kind of digital currency. It can be earned through the trade and purchase of in-game items via Gamertoken’s own digital store or through the stores provided by other games who choose to use the currency.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like too big of a deal, but an article by medium sums up the most important thing the currency will add to the trading and sale of in-game goods.

“Existing third party marketplaces for game items operate in the dark, outside of the control of the game developers and publishers who are unable to capture this additional value. This gives rise to account hacking and exorbitant fees. Utilizing the ERC-721 non-fungible token standard, combined with a publisher supported marketplace, in-game cosmetic assets, such as rare skins, can be issued in limited quantities by game developers, tracked, and traded on the GamerToken marketplace using smart-contracts. This ecosystem empowers players to have enhanced security and ownership of the value created by digital assets.”

The Gamertoken system could also allow publishers to benefit directly from consumers, and reward them via this currency which could then be traded for in-game items or back to cash. If publishers were to offer contests or competitions with Gamertokens as rewards, dedicated gamers with modeling and design skills might be motivated to craft unique in-game items for sale on a digital marketplace.

What’s more, a universal currency might allow different individuals to organize trades in between games. If one person wants an item from one game, they could buy it from a user for an amount of Gamertoken equal to its market worth, or, even more interesting, trade it for a similarly valued item owned by another customer.

Gamertokens also offers publishers the ability to produce something known as “digital scarcity”, which is used to make certain items or skins more valuable via a marketplace system. Gamertoken allows publishers to track how many of a certain item are active on its market, and limit that number to an extreme low in order to drive that item’s value through the roof.

Using Gamertoken, publishers could even “pay” eSports champions via unique in-game items rather than actual cash. Because of the way this market would function, the unique items would be worth an incredible amount of Gamertoken for those fans with the money to offer up. In this way, the community could effectively “pay” pro gamers without the publishers having to step in, with the pros exchanging their items for Gamertoken and then exchanging the token for cash.

Bringing the trade of in-game items into the light and out of shady third-party shops is a promising idea that could easily change very many things about how the games market operates. If the venture is successful, it may make the trade and ownership of digital items a much more consumer-friendly environment than it has been in the past, which would surely be a positive to gamers everywhere.

Featured Image via Gamertoken Official Site