Playing competitive esports games and earning crypto is quite accessible nowadays. However, traditionally esports, playing games for a living, is only available to the very best. Everybody else just plays games online, competitively or not. When a professional gamer wins a tournament, they often need to wait before they receive their prize money. Esports gaming platforms that tap into crypto and blockchain technology completely change that. Every gamer can start playing to win money, while payments happen instantly.
Games like Axie Infinity, League of Kingdoms and Alien Worlds offer play-to-earn mechanics that are a bit more friendly. However, we're talking about being competitive here: esports. It's a different type of play-to-earn, as there's often a sign-up payment involved as well.
In this article we take a look at games or gaming platforms that tap into this new growth sector for esports. Very often these platforms require an initial sign-up fee before joining a tournament or match. This fee becomes part of the prize pool and is skill-based. The list below is in alphabetical order.
Chain Games is an esports gaming service that adds an extra crypto layer to already popular games. Special servers can only be accessed by paying CHAIN tokens. At the end of each match the rewards go to the best players. Chain Games also announced support for Atari's ATRI token. They launched their product last year and integrated it into Call of Duty Warzone. Recently they announced support for Fortnite, while other games like Madden NFL, Counter-Strike and FIFA will be added soon. Chain Games only works with PC games though. - official website
Community Gaming started as an esports organization that created physical events, but their online service became a priority when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now they've become a premier esports platform, allowing tournament organizers to setup competitions for a variety of games across different platforms. Ranging from League of Legends to Starcraft, and from Call of Duty Mobile to Gods Unchained and Axie Infinity. Each tournament has a different setup. Before joining all players need to send their entry fee to a smart contract. This smart contract automatically distributes the player earnings once the tournament ends. - official website
Lightnite is a battle royale game that taps into two layer-2 solutions on the Bitcoin blockchain. First of all players can buy skins, and the game stores these skins into the player's wallet on the Liquid Network. So yes, even the Bitcoin blockchain has NFTs, and there's trading involved. In addition there's the Lightning Network, which takes care of payments. This is a central part of the more competitive gaming mode in Lightnite. Players need to get in, connecting their Lightning Wallet to the game and having some satoshis in there. Every time you shoot an enemy, you grab satoshis from them. When they hit you, you lose some. All those payments are instant. - official website
Earlier this year Zebedee launched Infuse, a platform that allows players to earn bitcoin instantly while playing games. The app currently supports only Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but they are considering more games. Infuse is basically an overlay over existing software to uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Every player pays a certain amount of satoshis, a fragment of a bitcoin, to join an Infuse server. During the Counter-Strike match players earn bitcoin by shooting other people, while they lose sats when being hit. More games will be added to the platform in the future, think about Minecraft, Call of Duty, Dota 2 or Battlefield. - official website
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