General Idea
Gameflip wants to improve its platform, which focuses on the trade of game-related items and digital goods. Blockchain technology will significantly improve the quality and efficiency of such platforms. This infrastructure and the FLIP smart contracts will improve transparency and eliminate trust issues or scam and fraud possibilities.
Trade of digital goods
With the game industry developing rapidly in recent years and game developers adding more and more tradeable and valuable items and objects to their games, there is possibly a need for places where gamers could benefit from what they earn in games. It also promotes the idea of general liquidity, as nowadays, once the gamer stops playing the game, all of the achievements and items he has earned will become worthless. With a good trading platform, he can not only make some spare money but also exchange digital goods and objects of value between even not related games.
Million dollar market
For most people not familiar with the gaming industry, especially from the gamer’s point of view, it may sound weird that virtual items like weapons, armor, character skins, or other digital assets can be sold even for thousands of dollars. There are examples like a CS: GO weapon skin which was sold for $23.850, or a very rare Dota 2 item for $38.000. Recently, these two games have been the leading ones when it comes to producing items of value. They also have a very active user base. Newzoos’s study states that the estimated game revenue of 2017 is $94.4 billion.
Trust Issues
As most of the trades used to happen through game chats or game-related forums, there were situations when one of the sides didn’t deliver what they had promised. The seller would send the digital good yet not receive the payment or get a chargeback soon after. The same problem occurs when the buyer first pays for the items, yet the seller doesn’t deliver them or sends the wrong one, where there is a need for a secure trade and protection of buyer and seller.
The token
The FLIP token will act as proof of ownership of these game-related digital goods. Gamers will be able to easily buy and sell their digital goods instantly and safely with smart contracts. It is much more convenient to conduct such trades with cryptocurrencies rather than fiat money, which would result in payment delays and significant fees.
Open-sourced SDKs
Apart from that, the project will also focus on helping game developers. Connecting the tokens with their games can act as an additional stream of revenue. It’s interesting that the developer’s tool will remain in the open source field, which can boost the trust for Gameflip and act as proof of caring about general transparency. Developers can independently build tools and benefit from having their tools adopted by users.
ICO
The main ICO phase starts on the 4th of December and will last until the 29th of January, 2018. The tokens can be bought with ETH, with the initial exchange rate being set at 240 FLIPs for 1 ETH. The price will slowly rise. Therefore, the earlier a potential investor decides to buy the tokens, the better the price. Even at such an early stage, the tokens are already said to be available on exchanges such as EtherDelta, HitBTC, and Livecoin.
Already established brand
It’s worth noting that Gameflip is already a working platform with a few years of experience in providing an infrastructure for buying and selling digital game-related goods. And that’s what makes them stand out from the other ICO projects which want to offer similar platforms. They get over 10 million visitors monthly, and over 2 million gamers have already traded on their platform. In such cases, connecting the platform with blockchain technology can only improve the whole technical part, especially when it comes to the transparency and security of transactions, which can greatly encourage new users.
The team
The team behind Gameflip is relatively small. However, the advisory board is very expanded and includes some significant experts in technology and the gaming industry. It’s worth noting that the project is backed by the founder of Electronic Arts (EA). The team generally consists of people skilled in the blockchain and ICO phase, as well as general marketing and business development. The additional information and previous experience can be traced as the team link their LinkedIn profiles.
Final Thoughts
The sole idea of an ICO project focused on the trade of digital game-related goods has been quite popular recently among a few ICO projects. However, in comparison to other similar projects, Gameflip undoubtedly has the advantage of already operating in this business with success. Their advisory board consists of founders of big gaming companies, and such experience in creating successful companies will surely make a positive impact on this project.
Gameflip will provide the developers with SDK, so we may expect it to be connected to some games quickly. Therefore, there is a chance of Flip becoming a leading game token. The biggest obstacle for the project seems to be the numerous competition. However, they are all in the early development stages, while Gameflip already has a working platform.
With the gaming market rapidly expanding, they can become a significant or even leading platform and marketplace for game-related items in the future. In-game items are not useless digital goods anymore, but there is a huge demand for them, especially when it comes to rare or unusual items. Therefore, they don’t need to worry about problems connected with the lack of potential platform users.
