After reading this article about how a bitcoin currency exchange has won the right to work as a bank bitcoins suddenly seam to be an interesting idea to fund games.
I thought of these ideas ages ago when I first heard of bitcoins but as there was not much you could do with them I did not think much of the ideas till now.
First idea: You can gain more bitcoins by mining them on a computer, most mining is done by graphic cards now a days rather than cpu’s due to there power and a lot of graphic cards running unity games have left over power so the idea is to make an online unity game with a bitcoin miner backend that mines for bitcoins while the person is playing the game with the coins going back to the game makers. This game should be free and open about the mining stating its how the game stays free. If you get a hit game going imagine having a large amount of people mining coins for you I even thought up an idea for a good game when I thought up this idea but I’m sure most people will be able to think up one that would work well as well.
Second idea: Rather more simple make the same game as above or a free to play game but each bitcoin the players earn for the game makers they get a game point they can spend in game or but the points using normal cash.
Third idea I just thought up: A free to play game that excepts bitcoins to pay for paid for items as well as cash let the players figure out how to get bitcoins you just accept them in the game.
Because that’s a totally different market, everyone who is making a free to play game is trying to add virtual tokens you know what the conversion rate is for free to play players buying tokens? It’s under 10% see here for citation. And that’s only if your successful it reality it might be as low as .01% and that’s if your lucky. With the ideas I suggested everyone who plays is making you money. Or people with spare bitcoins and don’t know what do to do with them can use them to buy stuff on your game and as your the only game accepting bitcoins your the only game they can spend it in having a 100% claim on the bitcoin game market till someone copies you.
Its all about markets and where the money is. If everyone is going for the free to play but pay for premium market and the bitcoin market is neglected go there and clean up.
I know you where trying to point out that there are things called virtual currency but you missed the point its not about adding a virtual currency its about making money in an alternative way by having people play your game instead if hoping they like it and will pay you to buy stuff which where like I linked to shows it is not that effective as having 100% of the player base make you money by mining in the the background.
Also I have morals and while I would like to make a fun game that would encourage people to come back I would never make an addictive game that forces people to come back and play like Zenga and other such company’s do.
I like 2 3 better. I wouldn’t want to limit my game to use less gpu to earn bitcoins. I’d rather for players to choose to pay with cash or pay with bitcoins, generating them whenever they want, such as while they sleep.
Although right now I’m not interested in earning bitcoins and actually have always resented bitcoins because it’s strong competition for more important distributed computing projects such as the scientific/medical ones like folding@home by Standford University, whose purpose is to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases(eg. alzheimer’s). Bitcoins has 36 times as much computing power donated to it than the second most popular distributed computing project folding@home.
However, I do think it would be cool if we can have a way in the near future to have all digital money and stop expending so much metal and paper to make physical money. I don’t think I like the bitcoin idea of using computing power and electricity and hardware wear tear to create small amounts of digital money though.
Btw just checked out that site I quickly goggled and linked to to show conversion rates and its looks interesting see this Link for an archive to there magazine on causal games ill give it a look over tomorrow as its late lol
That is until they mine 21 million bit coins then no more can be made see the wiki, they can split a single bitcoin down though so after there all made its just the same pool going around and around.
So let me get this right (I just read some of the wikipedia page) … you release say a desktop game and the people who play it use some of their gpu/cpu power to process complicated proof problems and return the answers to the network, and each time they get rewarded with some small amount of bitcoin currency, which can be fed to you as the manager of your game network… but is it a significant enough fee to work out well? And doesn’t it require the installation/use of some special software?
I think he means the bitcoin will go to the creator of the game so the game can stay free, and use the bitcoin for expenses.
Anyway, if you somehow do implement this kind of mechanic in a game, each player will only contribute about 1.25 cents per hour. That is assuming that said player has a 300 dollar graphics card.
If you are making an online game, servers cost around 5 million dollars / yr to seat 100,000 people.
That means 416.7k for server cost a month with 100,000 players. Each player needs to rake in $4.17 to break even. Which means 333 hours will need to be invested per player. Which means that player needs to play 11 hours a day.
SETI did that with their screensaver. You’re not using your PC when the screensaver is on, so why not have the screensaver process tons of data?
That system was the biggest distributed processor system ever.
Damn that sounds like it would cost way more for the extra electricity used than you’d get leaving your pc on at night with your gpu maxed out to generate bitcoins. I don’t know why anyone would bother computing for bitcoins at that rate.
People who mine bitcoins usually have $2000+ graphics card and boards used by researcher facilities. Everything has to run low on electricity or you lose money. Even if you buy all the nice stuff, it will have to be a 24’7 machine, and I really doubt at all if it could even become a full time job.
Besides, this economic part of this is incredibly unstable. A bubble can burst at any time.
This is what the great part of this is instead of having one £2000+ machine running one miner you have hundreds if not thousands maybe more smaller machines mining for you, its there electricity there using which they would use anyway when there playing a game all you need is a small server to handle the distributed miners.
Right now I feel bitcoins are at the edge of becoming stable or crashing, not many people accept them and they are becoming more difficult to mine each time a new bit coin is made but with a bitcoin exchange becoming a bank it stabilizes it a bit and with not many people accepting bitcoins its an open market for anyone to step in and say give me your bit coins for fancy virtual hats or levels heh
I would not recommend a mpog game but a single player game is that is connect online to process the bitcoins and one that is fun but not to much graphically orientated so you have spare processing power for the mining.
I have no idea what the mining rate is for an average computer would be but it would be interesting to see some figures but 1.25 cents an hour could be right thats why you need a hit if you have say 10k people playing your game non stop which is possible for a free game that’s 12500 cents an hour which is $125 an hour to me thats nothing to balk at.
Not to mention that the rewards just halved, so now it’s even harder to make money at it.
Bitcoin mining is really expensive unless you’re set up properly for it. I would find it abusive to use people like that, and I’d boycott a company that used their customers like that without warning them of the entire cost they’d incur.
can we limit the minning software to not overuse your gpu/cpu? then you can make their machine mine during their playing session of your "free"game and you just take the bitcoin for you! ( but it has to be limited or the game framerate will be too low)
Wow, this is a major necro post… but at any rate it’s no longer relevant. Because of the market saturation it takes some pretty serious horsepower to mine bitcoins and they don’t even recommend doing GPU based mining anymore because the cost of electricity will be more than you’ll ever get… not to mention that you may mine for years and never get a single block. Now they have rigs specifically dedicated to coin mining (the newest generating 2 TH/s).
I even thought up an idea for a good game when I thought up this idea but I’m sure most people will be able to think up one that would work well as well.