Why Brian Fargo thinks blockchain is key to an alternative PC game store
0Why Brian Fargo thinks blockchain is key to an alternative PC game store.
Veteran game publisher Brian Fargo and other game industry veterans announced a plan to shake up PC digital game purchases this week with the announcement of Robot Cache and its planned cryptocurrency, dubbed Iron.
Their idea comes amid a sometimes hot, sometimes not — but always volatile — market for cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. Fargo’s plan to stage an initial coin offering (ICO) raised a lot of eyebrows among the 1,400 attendees to the Casual Connect USA 2018 event this week in Anaheim, California, where blockchain sessions were quite popular. Fargo’s new company will create a digital PC games platform as an alternative to Valve’s Steam digital distribution service.
But Fargo plans to give game publishers and developers about 95 percent of the proceeds from game sales, rather than just 70 percent as Steam and others do. It will also pay them quickly, in contrast to slow payments by the big app stores. Fargo hopes to leverage his relationships from 30 years of making games to sign up the major game publishers and developers, which, in turn, will help draw consumers to the new store. The ope is to take away some of the arbitrary power over game distribution from the platform owners.
“I think this could be a paradigm shift for the industry,” Fargo said. “It could be a game changer.”