Casual gaming and esports have both seen meteoric surges in popularity across the world, with more people than ever tuning in to competitive tournaments and playing games across a variety of platforms, from smartphones to high-end gaming PCs.
Built By Gamers, an esports organisation based in North America, see massive potential in the growth of gaming and the ways that the BSV blockchain can be applied to realise unique use cases in this arena.
The organisation fields professional esports teams for Fortnite, Valorant and Call of Duty, and it has also partnered with a network of creators to produce widely popular gaming-related content across a range of platforms. Built By Gamers believes that the gaming ecosystem encompasses a wide range of people and communities, from fans of professional streamers to casual mobile gamers.
As part of its strategy to interact more with this diverse and populated ecosystem, Built By Gamers plans to leverage the BSV blockchain to offer interactive platforms that cater to fans and players. This type of blockchain-based application is uniquely enabled by the BSV blockchain, as it offers unbounded scaling with ultra-low transaction fees and complex smart contract support, making it the ideal infrastructure on which to build these next-generation interactive tools within the gaming space.
To find out more about how Built By Gamers plans to use BSV to launch exciting new platforms in the gaming space, Bitcoin Association spoke to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Tyler Farnsworth and Strategic Advisor Taylor Searle.
‘BSV will set us apart’
Farnsworth and Searle explain that by using the BSV blockchain, they can offer a new level of interaction to their fans that will revolutionise gaming. The tools offered by BSV enable the organisation to gamify the fan experience in a way that promotes interaction and rewards those who follow and watch esports.
‘We have different teams, influencers, creators that compete in the world of gaming and that generate an audience in the world of gaming. And the gaming space is funny because it’s not as defined as some people think, it’s actually quite wide. There’s a lot of people out there from various audiences who love this gaming ecosystem,’ Farnsworth says.
‘We went down this path of exploring what opportunities were out there. Taylor had a sense of what is likely the best fit for us, I had to come down that path, but ultimately we looked at what was going to give us the quantity of transactions at the speed that we needed it, as well as at the cost that was appropriate for the scale of what we were trying to do.’
‘Ultimately, for us, the utility of what blockchain can do is what’s critical. Also, I would say the community involved is critical as well. If you have a community that’s not growing, that’s not robust, that’s not investing, it would have been very challenging for us to stake our ground and put our efforts into this. All of those things led us to the BSV blockchain.’
‘The BSV ecosystem really unlocks our ability to achieve our goals. So as an esports organisation, we want to engage fans, create loyal communities of fans, give them unique experiences. That’s what will set us apart from our competitors in the industry. The BSV blockchain really unlocks things that haven’t existed before,’ Searle adds.
One of the most exciting capabilities of the BSV blockchain for Built By Gamers is its facilitation of global leaderboards, Searle explains. These can reward fans for their interaction and loyalty in a way that turns them into gamers themselves, with those most avid fans topping leaderboards as ‘superfans’.
‘Gamification of the fan experience is the thing I love to point at. We really live in an era of gamification where everything is about levelling up, about challenging yourself. And so, if we can give fans a way to be gamers themselves as they are fans of gamers, we can create an ecosystem. The blockchain really unlocks that in ways that just haven’t existed in history.’
‘Gamification isn’t inherently something exclusive to just blockchain, but the thing the blockchain really enables us to do is global leaderboards. Imagine a leaderboard with a top 10 list of superfans based on how fast they react to our social media posts, whether they engage in sponsorship events, come to live events and get extra bonus points.’
‘But imagine this top 10 leaderboard of fans and how that gamifies this fan experience to say, “Hey, I want to be a top fan”, because if you’re in the top 10 of all fans, you have perks. You might be able to get access to special events, you might be able to interact with players or play with them. We can create a whole bunch of fan perks that go to people at the top of the leaderboard.’
Building on the entire BSV ecosystem
As part of its adoption of the BSV blockchain and the roll-out of its new fan interaction offerings, Built By Gamers aims to assimilate its services into the HandCash ecosystem. HandCash is a BSV wallet service that functions similarly to an app store for the BSV ecosystem; it offers a single identity and sign-in portal through which users can access a broad range of linked BSV applications in addition to normal wallet services and payments.
‘The goal is: let’s have everyone in our entire community have a HandCash wallet and every platform in this ecosystem integrated with HandCash, so that using HandCash, someone can use it as their identity provider to just log in, single sign-on, automatically to all these different platforms and be able to have this Duro economy, and then bring in NFTY Jigs to have their digital items working the same way,’ Farnsworth says.
NFTY Jigs is a platform and framework that allows developers to easily create digital assets such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the BSV blockchain. It offers accessibility and built-in compatibility with many other NFT platforms, making it an excellent choice for building NFTs that can be traded widely and applied to a growing BSV ecosystem.
‘That’s the phase one launch – we want to take advantage of the entire ecosystem,’ Farnsworth says.
The potential applications of the BSV blockchain for gamification in the esports and gaming industry are myriad. Searle and Farnsworth believe that the global leaderboard platform and future initiatives will see great success among gamers and fans as it speaks to the core of what makes gaming so popular.
‘I’m imagining that gaming becomes the largest form of entertainment period, and everything will bring gaming or gamification into it just to ride that wave. Because, like I said before, I think that gaming, true gaming, really speaks to the human soul. We all want to gamify our progression,’ Searle says.
‘Being a bit better each day, levelling up, finding ways to improve. I think that at a core, that’s what a gamer is. It’s not just the act of playing the game, but it’s being a bit better each and every day,’ Farnsworth adds.
