Xpring and Forte Partner for Game Developer Fund
According to a press release issued on March 12, Xpring, Ripple’s software developer Ecosystem project, has partnered with gaming industry platform Forte to establish a $100 million fund that will support game developers.
Targeting Mass Adoption of Blockchain
According to news reports, all the funding for this initiative will be provided by Ripple, while Forte will manage the fund.
This new initiative is focused on encouraging the mass adoption of Blockchain technology in the gaming industry by increasing player engagement and monetization.
According to reports, Forte is focusing on game developers that are operating live game economies that have over 50,000 daily active users, and also have shown interest in the deployment of Blockchain based games.
The Chief Platform Officer of Forte Brett Seyler states that key innovations in Blockchain technologies unlock huge amounts of potential for almost all types of digital interactions.
Seyler also points out that the global gaming industry is currently valued at more than $140 billion. It is also driven largely by digital micro-transaction economies. He feels that such economies will benefit greatly from Blockchain technology, which offers resilience as well as integrity, which will make such micro-transaction economies more reliable.
The senior vice president of Xpring, Ethan Beard states both companies share the belief that this new technology can have a huge impact on the gaming industry, and that giving access to easy-to-use, interoperable and chain agnostic tools to game developers is a necessary step in pushing for mass adoption.
Giving Credibility to the Gaming Industry
This new initiative is important because online gaming secondary markets – even the most popular ones – are not well developed. They are also not quite legal. Serious gamers buy player accounts from eBay and other such platforms for large amounts of money. Others will go to third party websites to buy in-game currencies such as the gold required in World of Warcraft.
These transactions can be made in-game if these platforms incorporate Blockchain technology, thereby giving more credibility to the industry and also cutting down on the grey markets currently flourishing.
An example of how this could work is from Crypto Kitties, a game where users could buy and sell digital cats that were so unique that some of them sold for thousands of dollars. The game eventually faded into obscurity because of the Blockchain it used – the Ethereum platform, which did not have the scalability required for a huge number of transactions.
Which is why, in this initiative, Forte is relying on Ripple’s technology, which includes the Interledger Protocol and the smart contract service Codius, to ensure scalability.