Steam is one of the most popular gaming platforms in the world. The platform is the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming and is estimated to have 75% of the market space.
Currently, the platform has over 150 million registered accounts, with over $4 billion in global sales.
This is just a fraction of the size of the gaming community worldwide and a partial glimpse into the vast potential that can be unlocked for the right projects.
However, being a centralized platform Steam does have its drawbacks. Most notably, players can acquire to collect digital assets through the games that they play. These items can be stored, sold or bought via the Steam marketplace.
However, upon finalizing a transaction, players are commonly faced with 12% or more fees to complete the transaction. So why is there this fees discrepancy? Moreover, why does the seller not receive all entireties of the funds?
According to Steam, fees have to be paid to Steam for administrating the transaction, and a fee has to be paid to the game developer in which the item relates to.
As a result, this is an excellent opportunity for blockchain and smart contracts to come in and eliminate some of those unnecessary middlemen, and this precisely what WAX is aiming to do.
WAX (WAX) is a decentralized platform, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, which enables anyone to operate a fully functional virtual marketplace.
So if users wanted to start their video games, with their digital assets, and they wanted those assets to be tradeable- they could quickly adopt the WAX marketplace and eliminate the requirement of having to create their marketplace for trading those digital assets and use the WAX marketplace instead.
A representative from OPSkins, a digital asset marketplace has stated they have over two million transactions per week, where assets such as video game skins are traded. This represents just one of the marketplaces for digital assets trading marketplaces.
However, all of these centralized platforms all have the same issue of high fees. Lootbear, another platform charge over 5% fees on transactions. Some users try to bypass these fees by using black markets, but this then increases the chance of fraud and scams exponentially.
This provides a great opportunity for blockchain and smart contracts to ensure for atomic trading- so the trades only go through when both users receive what they expect to have received in the trade.
The creators of the WAX platform are the same people responsible for creating OPSkins, which is an established marketplace for digital assets. The project aims to integrate WAX’s blockchain technology to create a much more enhanced user experience.
For the users, it would be much better if there was a P2P platform where users can trade skins and digital assets without having to use a third-party.
There is a drawback to what WAX is trying to achieve, however. Valve, the owner of Steam has repeatedly blocked the trades of any of their skins over the OPSkins platform and via WAX.
The reason being, every time a skin owned by Valve is traded outside of their platforms, that is lost revenue for the company. This has resulted in OPSkins not containing as many big-games as hoped.
If OPSKins continues to allow for further outside trades of Valve property on their platform, this opens up WAX for a protracted battle with an established and well-funded company.
This is a significant issue that needs to be cleared; however WAX would be ideal for smaller independent game developers to use the platform for their operations.
This is likely to remain true until there is a paradigm shift in gaming and digital assets.
This article was originally published on Blockspectator.
