Gaming - Not DeFi - will Provide Mass Crypto Adoption

Joshua Galloway has been a gamer since he was a child. His father worked at Litton Industries which made gyroscopes for missile defence systems in the US – which also made microwave ovens – but he brought home the latest PCs.

As a result, Galloway and his twin brother spent a lot of time on the PC – as well as fighting off their other four siblings – and were the only kids on the block to have a PC in the home. Gaming and basic coding fascinated them with Galloway now heading up one of the fastest moving blockchain gaming platforms in Lepricon and his brother working in the game development industry.

“Games have changed a lot since then,” he admits. “We played games like Olympics which basically consisted of two dots running around a track. Then we got an upgrade to a games console similar to an Atari."

“But whatever we had, we often had a family games night. It was in our blood,” says Galloway.

Galloway took a job at God Games, part of Rockstar Games and the maker of the popular Grand Theft Auto. He had a choice to go to New York or Hong Kong.

“I came for one year and I’m still here 20 years later,” says Galloway.

Galloway was involved in publishing games across Asia and watched huge amounts crowdfunded for games, including Star Citizen which raised $300 million. Watching the AAA games doing so well Galloway was also aware that these games would eat into ordinary budgets.

The internet and massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming changed the gaming landscape overnight. Galloway became general manager of a launchpad in Hong Kong, looking for tech startups to launch new games and distribute them into Asia. His second startup was based in Malaysia and was a digital distribution platform.

“This was in the ‘90s so we had to contend with very slow speed broadband.”

But while they were distributing casual games, some of the technology was pretty revolutionary for its time.

“It’s now standard fare – digital rights management, content delivery networks, billing and payment systems – but at the time we were cutting edge,” he says.

Galloway then went into Brunei via a telecom deal offering value-added services to the billing system so that everyone had access to free games.

“Before there was widespread piracy in gaming, but by giving them free games we were helping legitimize the game industry.”

Galloway used a process where the gaming platform only streamed the first 10 or 20% making it lighter on bandwidth, but they kept on bundling free or low-cost games.

“We replaced things like the Encyclopedia Britannica which was been pushed out of popularity by software services like Google Search and Wikipedia. We persuaded the broadband providers to give us a tiny transaction fee per user which in turn allowed us to pay royalties to the games companies.”

Previously, games developers were not earning any money with wholescale piracy, this was literally a game-changer.

MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, have always fascinated Galloway, not that he has much time to get involved.

“Some games might take 40 people and hours just to get ready – then someone slips up and everyone has to start again – as a father and entrepreneur I just don’t have time. Actually, a friend of mine pays someone to play for him – that’s one solution I suppose."

“When you are a founder you are wearing 50 hats – but it is important to spend some of your spare time in the gaming world – just to keep in touch.”

The play-to-earn concept has also caught Galloway’s eye. It’s not enough to tempt him but a kid in the Philippines might make a decent living playing a couple of shifts a week. This is proven by the Axie Infinities game which topped more than 800,000 people on their server in July.

“Blockchain and the gaming industry are colliding in a big way and play to earn can now be considered mature.”

For Galloway, blockchain and Bitcoin only came to his attention in 2016 where he lives in a village in Northeast Hong Kong. A group of his neighbours, all of them international pilots, began buying Ethereum and comparing their wallets at the weekend.

Galloway remembers: “It was getting hard to ignore and then in the same year, the Chinese Government stopped issuing licenses to both foreign and domestic content in the gaming industry. My business came to a
complete halt.”

As a result, Galloway began reading white papers – lots of them – on anything to do with digital assets, stickers in messaging apps, in fact, anything gaming-related. It made sense to him that gamers would want to own the items in the game and that non-fungible tokens
were the answer.

In-game assets last year accounted for $54 billion which is projected to grow to $77.4 billion by 2025 – that is making a difference.

“There are two approaches - one is to use a Metaverse with multiple games engines, the other is that people are using NFT avatars in social media like Twitter. The two worlds are colliding.

“People are getting their dot.eth name, getting an NFT and becoming part of online communities. Heck, we may even do our own 10,000 leprechaun NFTs.”

Right now, Lepricon, perhaps named for an Irish little person, is more than just technology showcases. It’s leveraged for cross chain bridges in the future.

“We are in uncharted territory. Where only one percent of the world owns a digital asset or a crypto wallet. Gaming is one of the ways we are going to grow this market and onboard new people.”

Lepricon is expanding its game base. Shamrock Studios, its system company, is developing a game called Get the Cats which is an AR game where cats appear in front of your phone to be captured.

“We are experimenting with games and blockchain, maybe bringing in an older title in a free-to-play format.”

Many NFT projects have approached Lepricon with simple game sets, perhaps with card collections.

“But I want to stress we are not just a technology showcase. We are going to offer quality gameplay, sometimes with blockchain but not always. We might ask that you onboard a wallet which may receive an NFT which can in turn be used in different games,” he says.

The engine of the Lepricon platform will be a dynamic, self-sustaining
community of users, gamers, and developers. And it is the native L3P token that will provide the fuel for these community-owned and community-governed platforms.

In the future, users will be able to stake their L3P in our virtual
pools and transact with the token in decentralised games built on the Lepricon infrastructure, where L3P serves as the in-game currency.

“Currently, the closest thing gamers have to a universal currency that
they can use during and out of play is fiat currency. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies will topple this system, and it will happen sooner than expected,” says Galloway.

This article is part of The Gaming Metaverse Writing Contest hosted by HackerNoon in partnership with The Sandbox.

Submit your #gaming-metaverse story today for your chance to win up to $2000.