Gaming is a big industry, and with the advent of mobile phones and microtransactions, it has become even bigger. Some of the largest gaming companies in the world exclusively service the mobile market, and many traditional publishers are looking to leverage their IPs into the lucrative mobile market.

The advent of blockchain-based decentralized apps has been moving quickly in recent months with EOS and Tron both overtaking Ethereum by a long way. Ethereum was the originator of the idea of decentralized applications, and its current position was cemented in large part due to the viability of dapps on their platform.

One such dapp, CryptoKitties, was just such an innovative example. It showed the world how you could make a successful, engaging game that uses blockchain technology and profit off of it. While the craze over CryptoKitties has died down somewhat over the last year, the currency of the game (the kitties) has kept their price remarkably well. In a market that saw the collapse of many a coin, CryptoKitties are worth about as much as they were at the height of the craze.

This goes to show the lengths to which gamers will fanatically obsess over their digital products and gives us an insight into the future of decentralized gaming. The use cases so far have been with the digital rights to own characters and other in-game items and to profit by selling on to other people. This is nothing new, as many a WoW or Diablo 2 player will tell you. However, it is a far better and much more secure system than the current options available in either of those two games. In fact, a blockchain based auction house for Diablo 3 might have actually been accepted by the community, unlike the system that eventually found its way into the game at launch.

Let's take a look at the market today and see what games show the way forward in the gaming sector of blockchain based dapps. It is important to remember that these games are still early implementations of an idea and will, by necessity have smaller userbases than traditional games.

Solitaire Duel

Solitaire Duel claims to be the first skill-based game using the EOS blockchain and allows players to place a stake on the outcome of the game using their EOS tokens. While the user base is not overly large, it has the advantage since it is a 1v1 PVP game and thus does not need an overly large population for people to be able to find challengers.

It also does not compare favorably well with the immense transactions that are found on the top mobile games, but it is one of the highest grossing EOS games at this time. It is also extremely fun and well made, which is a point many forget to take into account when looking at a new entrant into the gaming market.

EOS Knights:

First EOS game is the king of them all

EOS Knights consistently rank among the top games on the EOS blockchain, which shows how dedicated the development team is. They were the first to launch and have kept up the quality standards that have allowed them to keep their place as one of the top games in the dapp market.

This game is a perfect example of how players would have reacted when Diablo 3 released its auction house. That was a mistake, while this blockchain, decentralized marketplace has the power fo blockchain behind it. It is the perfect use case for similar games where certain items are exceedingly difficult to find.

XPET: Evolution of CryptoKitties

While the in-game assets are not worth as much as CryptoKitties were (the most expensive going for close to $100 thousand worth of ETH), it is still based on the same principle where people collect and upgrade digital pets.

XPETs, however, adds various layers of complexity to the ideas birthed by CryptoKitties by adding in buildings and controllable territories. The evolution of such a game type is heartening to see and is exactly what makes the current wave of blockchain games so exciting. It's a completely new field, and the big winners are always the consumers.

Prospectors:

What better way to enjoy crypto than recreating a gold rush

Prospectors is described by creators as an MMORTS. The transactions are based on an in-game economy that changes dynamically based on what players want, need, and have. It is also a play on the crypto gold rush, with the player having three workers they can send digging and being able to team up with other players to form larger mining corporations.

Items collected in the game can all be traded with other players, and it certainly a wonderfully creative way to use dapps for fun and for profit.

EOS’s price is $1.13 EOS/USD exchange rate today. The real-time EOS market cap of $1.23 Billion currently ranks #40 with , daily trading volume of $50.76 Million and live coin value change of EOS -3.68 in the last 24 hours.