A thought experiment in blockchain mobile gaming

Welcome to the latest in our series of Pocket Gamer columns. We're taking the best games writers in the industry and giving them a platform. Veteran journalist Jon Jordan is here each week examining the trends shaping your mobile games scene. This week, he got a new job.

Last week I launched a website called BlockchainGamer.biz.

I don't want to get into too many details about what it's about. You'll have to read the site over the coming weeks and months to get the full experience.

But, suffice to say, I'm pretty excited about the whole blockchain thing and how it will change gaming. And not just mobile gaming, all gaming.

That's because the blockchain highlights the concept of the universality of games as well as enforcing the idea of the player as the owner of the games they play (or at least some elements of those games), in a way we've never experienced before.

And in terms of the ability to address a very wide audience of players this is something that's particularly relevant for free to play games, hence its relevance for mobile.

For example, imagine a world where one of your heavily customised characters from The Sims Mobile could be exported into Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, equipped with a lightsaber and other gear, and added to your squad to boost your Battle Arena ranking thanks to its funny chicken dance super move that kills Darth Vader through, say, suffocation because he's laughing so much he can't breathe properly through his mask?

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Personally, I'd find that pretty funny, although in terms of game design and visual integrity it's a terrible example. I don't think LucasArts would entertain it for a second.

So what if EA used a blockchain standard for the characters in The Sims Mobile whereby any developer could support them? Then you could take your tricked-out Sim and import it in card format into Clash Royale, where the funny chicken dance would make every attacking P.E.K.K.A. fall over laughing for 10 seconds? That could be interesting.

What's even more interesting is, assuming EA is using a standard blockchain technology, then any developer using that standard could set up a similar useful gameplay mechanic when you imported a character from The Sims Mobile into their game without getting EA's permission.

Obviously this could cause some problems, but everyone would suddenly be playing The Sims Mobile to customise and level up characters to make them most useful in the other games they were playing.

The Sims Mobile's player base - and its revenues - would explode.

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And that's not the only interesting attribute that creating blockchain-based characters would enable. Imagine you could sell those The Sims Mobile characters using a currency that could immediately be converted to any real-world currency?

Suddenly all those "interestings" become significant.

Everyone - gamer or not - would have a reason to play The Sims Mobile and create diverse, high level characters, either to play in other games, to trade for real money, or a bit of both.

Now imagine through the agency of a magical spell whereby all copyright issues disappear that's the situation for every character in every game.

In one game, Darth Vader is choking in hysterics at a dancing Sim, while in another Mario is bouncing on the head of a charging hog rider, and a screen away, Austin from Gardenscapes is the boss driver you've got to beat in CSR Racing 2. And you can own and buy and sell all of them.

It's also worth noting this ownership is very different to the very limited examples of asset ownerships gamers have previously experienced. In the case of blockchain items, even if EA switched off The Sims Online's servers and killed the game, all those characters would still work in those other games and could still be traded.

Indeed, the fact the original game's servers had been turned off would actually make those characters more valuable.

Certainly in terms of franchise integrity, it would be a very mixed up world and I think companies like EA, Nintendo, LucasArts, Marvel etc would have to see the potential for very large revenues before they'd start experimenting in it.

As ever, it will be down to the startups to take big creative and financial risks and hopefully gain bigger creative and financial rewards.

Yet it would also be a world which I think would quickly settle down to an equilibrium.

The best developers would make the best use of the available characters to come up with interesting new scenarios, and everyone would have the ability to make a bit of money out of all that time they spent playing games.

So that's what I'm currently doing in my new day job. It's the most fascinating thing I've worked on in almost 20 years of writing about gaming, and I hope you'll make the occasional detour to see what I'm up to.

(After your daily slice of PocketGamer, of course.)