Who is Community Gaming?
Community Gaming’s platform lets users organise their own esports tournaments using blockchain contracts. The company started as an in-person esports tournament operator for gamers of all levels. In 2019, the company started using smart contracts to transform its platform into a hybrid one that allows users to organise and participate in competitions online and in person.
“We were running events every single weekend as a grassroots esports tournament organiser. These were weekend events hosted at LAN centers, co-working spaces, bars, restaurants, and we would bring people together that shared a passion for games, like League of Legends, Hearthstone, Super Smash Brothers,” said Chris. “Those are some of our biggest games, with 50 to 100 people on the weekends, and they would play for 5 to 6 hours, and a lot of times they would connect with friends and go have a drink after work.”
One of the most significant pain points Community Gaming saw after hosting over 100 of these events was payments. They wanted to build out a platform, but when the pandemic hit, all of their events got shut down, and so they used that time to build out a platform to solve those pain points, around getting players paid quickly for a cheap amount and having it be transparent to the users.
It’s been about a year and a half, and they’ve expanded from their main market in North America to Latin America and parts of Southeast Asia. Many are free to enter, and it’s also a tool for people to create tournaments in under five minutes. This can be a game developer, a gaming guild, or a young tournament organiser worldwide.
“They’ll be able to set up a tournament in under five minutes and pre-configure their payments using blockchain payment technology, typically built on top of Ethereum. We use Ethereum layer twos, like polygon B & B chain, and soon Solana to enable these fast and cheap payments, so players can get paid out instantaneously for a few pennies that we now cover as the platform and it abstracts away, the complexities that are normally associated with Blockchain Solutions,” added Chris.
This means someone getting started and wanting to create a tournament for their community doesn’t have to know how wallets work. Neither do the players, and they don’t need to understand how smart contracts work. Community Gaming makes it super simple with a user interface to get started, create and pre-configure those payments, and that’s how they’ve been able to get to where they are with over 100,000 users playing in games.
Impacting Esports
Community Gaming’s platform has greatly helped in facilitating esports activities. The platform makes it easier for tournament organisers, who may not have the required resources or a huge team to run tournaments at scale, to create different types of esports tournaments under smart contracts.
Chris explains that they wanted to create this software to make it extremely easy to set up tournaments in under five minutes and to be able to make automated payments. When you use their platform, you can create your tournaments, and it can be in any format, single, double, Round Robin, or Battle Royale mode, and you can do that in under five minutes. You can choose any compatible token that’s Ethereum-based and soon Solana-based, and the last step is to pre-configure your payouts.
This is all done to abstract away any notion of wallets, wallet transactions, or smart contract interfaces. This means you can say first place gets 50% of what’s in this prize pool; Second place gets 25, etcetera all the way down to 64 individual payments that you can pre-configure.
Chris states, “The way this works is the money is held in escrow in an Ethereum-based smart contract, and this is really important because frequently, you’ll see issues in the esports industry where players are not getting paid on time. There are obviously horror stories of payments never arriving when they were promised they would and transparency issues.”
You can send in this payment through the Community Gaming platform to fund your prize pool anytime after the tournaments are created. Players can join knowing that the money is in escrow waiting for them, waiting to be paid out to the winners, and it’s not a situation where someone can retract it and take the money back out.
Once the money is in the smart contract, it’s held there in escrow, and it gets sent out through one click of a button by the tournament organiser. This makes it very simple to automate those payments and makes this a seamless experience for esports tournament organisers and gamers.
Leveraging the Blockchain
Community Gaming is an esports competition platform that claims to be the most comprehensive and cutting-edge competition platform. Community Gaming enables players, tournament organisers, and game developers to create, manage, and participate in esports competitions using blockchain technology through its robust and user-friendly interface.
The company believes that the massive gains that the gaming industry can make are decentralized and accessible through web3 technology, allowing users to reward their time and action. The blockchain allows for fast, cheap, and transparent payments as players can get instant payments, and the fees are incredibly inexpensive.
Chris states, “You have this ability to have these much wider payment distributions and in emerging Markets like across Latin America, where we’re expanding quickly, this is really meaningful right as the ability to make a couple of dollars and not have been, the championship player, is a huge deal. So the ability to do these instant payouts, as they’re cheap, fast, and transparent are a big use case.”
Considering the NFT ecosystem, Chris also believes that NFTs can be applied to enhance these cosmetic game economies. “To know that this skin is one of, let’s say, 5,000 out there and maybe a famous streamer or famous Pro Player-owned it before you. This brings the idea of digital esports memorabilia, which is impossible in the Web2 worlds with centralised databases where you’ll have to trust the game developers and not be able to have this programmatic ability.”
Several financial services are built on top of NFTs and Tokens, and Chris is excited about the extensibility aspect of the secondary markets and these open game economies. Community Gaming also plans to support NFT payments on their platform very soon, as through this concept of “Play to Earn,” players can monetize their time and make money through playing games.
Original article: https://igamingbusiness.com/community-gaming-driving-growth-and-rewards-for-users/
