Over the past year, a discussion has raged as to whether the blockchain has a place within modern videogaming. Now however, perpetual villain, Blizzard, has provided the perfect example of how it could protect gamers from trigger happy developers.
Blizzard Opens a Can of Worms
Through its ‘Diablo Immortal’ mobile platform, gamers must acquire ‘eternal orbs’ in order to progress their characters, essentially giving participants the best chance of collecting ‘Legendary Gems’ in order to level up within the ecosystem. As such, Blizzard allows gamers to purchase these orbs on its marketplace, however, their expensive nature often leaves gamers seeking third party options.
In the murky world of mobile gaming, third party sites often acquire their assets through shady means. Therefore, breaching Blizzard’s terms and conditions and opening up an unpleasant can of worms. Rather than punish the seller, Blizzard chose to penalize their long-standing consumers by revoking all of the illicitly obtained orbs, seeing the platform playing God with the accounts of its userbase.
One particular high ranked wizard called Shia saw their account immediately hit a 2.5 million orb deficit, that would take a hefty $35k to overcome. The wizard saw his account locked until he repays the impossible debt, leaving him no choice but to give up on his thousands of hours gameplay and lose all of the money he invested in the game.
Perhaps There’s a Better Way
If such a platform employed the power of the blockchain however, any assets would belong wholly to the wallets in which they are contained. Therefore, any NFTs and in-game currencies would remain the property of the owner, which the developer would have no right or ability to revoke.
As a result, Shia could recoup some of his losses by selling his high tier NFTs and cashing out his in-game currency. However, as Blizzard controls all the assets in the Diablo Immortals ecosystem, Shia has no option but to leave empty handed.
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*All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFT Plazas are from the personal research and experience of our site moderators and are intended as educational material only. Individuals are required to fully research any product prior to making any kind of investment.
Decentralised human, Explorer, Adventurer.
