Blockchain technology will allow in-game organisations to become real companies that exist on-chain.
To the best of our knowledge this idea was first outlined in the following Medium blog: In game and on-chain: guilds can become companies. The idea can be summed up as:
Blockchain technology will facilitate a future where games and their guilds can exist entirely on-chain. With the advent of security tokens, guild ownership can be bought and sold at ease. Should the participants of the group work cooperatively to harvest resources then they can generate wealth like a company.
Guilds in future blockchain games will be registered on-chain: smart contracts can maintain a list of members and what their associated permissions are. Both the tracking and enforcement of privileges can be done on-chain.
As guild members can have the ability to manage shared assets, then by implication, it would be possible to manage guild income too. One thing that I think is necessary is the ability to keep this information secret, and to that extent we really need to see further work on privacy in smart contracts.
From understanding how a gaming guild works you can see the resemblance to a company. Whenever gaming assets have real value then the income generated by guilds can also have a real meaning. This aspect of is possible right now without blockchain technology, but given the lack of ownership of gaming assets plus the highly distributed nature of individual players around the globe, we are not seeing guilds become companies because of the difficulties with trust.
DAOs as esports teams
There is a difference between the DAOs we see today on Ethereum and this idea of a guild in a decentralized game. The DAOs we see that claim to be guilds or clans are just a way of organizing people in an offline manner: there is no regulation of the group’s behaviour inside a game. The DAO is complete distinct from any game; there is no overlap. This is basically the same as an eSports team.
The main idea here is to take a decentralized game and create enforceable rules for guilds. That is to say that the guilds will have a meaninful representation and set of rules within a game.
Smart Companies
In the future, guilds can become for-profit DAOs where ownership is distributed globally. To that extent, we may expect to see guilds use something like Aragon for management which has a nice UI for managing membership, permissions, and expenditure. However, there also needs to be something within the game logic that understands the meaning of a group of people that can work together (i.e. a guild).
The idea of creating a smart company is already possible on Ethereum, we can see this in projects as such the LAO and Korporatio. The latter team use the term “smart company” to refer to the entities they set up for clients. Registering a company is fully digital and the management is via something that resembles the Aragon interface.
Article’s Featured image:
“Guild management tools became more advanced and this made life easier (game: SWTOR, source)”
