A bubble happens when people expect too much of the future value of an asset. In the case of bitcoin, its value has greatly inflated over the years, from less than a dollar in 2009 to more than $8,000 today.
But how does the bitcoin bubble affect other industries? Truth is, it affects all major industries that are involved in trading and stocks.
One of those is the gaming industry, which is starting to embrace the idea of cryptocurrency and blockchains. The US gaming industry itself is a multibillion-dollar industry, providing $11.7 billion in annual GDP for the country.
Just a small percentage of that total is already a huge amount and can affect the economy. For now, let’s look at the bad side of bitcoin and how it affects the gaming industry in its entirety.
Hardware Inflation
Bitcoin mining is the only way to add more bitcoin into the market, and gaming computers are the most effective ones that mine because of their processing capacity.
However, this is hurting gamers because the demand for more calculation speed has caused the price of graphics processing units, or GPUs, to inflate. People will have to make do of the current prices of GPUs if they plan to build PCs at this time.
In fact, buying pre-built gaming computers is cheaper than building one because of the inflated price of GPUs.
Fluctuating Value
As a payment method, it provides an alternative for those who don’t want to use conventional means, like PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard. It also provides anonymity for traders, though this has caused alarm for major banks and the government since criminal organizations make use of the untraceable currency.
Additionally, gaming companies are starting to incorporate bitcoin as an alternative payment option, but buying bitcoins as a source of fund for games and in-game currency is not the best option at the moment.
With bitcoin’s fluctuating value, there is no guarantee that what you are buying now will have the same value by tomorrow. Game developers allowing people to pay through bitcoins is like allowing them to bet on a coin toss: there’s a 50-50 chance of winning or losing.
In other words, people have to look at investing in bitcoins carefully since major companies are also careful of it.
Limitation in Range
Another disadvantage of bitcoin is its scope. Not all gaming companies accept bitcoins as a mode of payment. Steam, a major gaming platform, has also recently stopped accepting bitcoin as payment because of its instability and cost. Plus, many people still don’t know what bitcoin is.
Limited information and limited acceptability provide a hindrance in the normalizing of the cryptocurrency. At the moment, nobody knows how cryptocurrency will fare in the future against other currencies. It’s safe to say that bitcoin will still be volatile in the following months, and saving up bitcoins just to spend on games would be absurd.
Is Bitcoin Really That Bad?
The bitcoin bubble is being debated if it’s really a bubble since it requires overvaluation to be called one. But after the sudden plummet of its value in January, the price seemed to normalize after forty-eight hours. Despite bitcoin’s instability, its concept is promising, and major companies are fascinated with the technology of blockchains. Bitcoin may be the future of gaming, but it’s not going to be in the near future.
I am a huge fan of cryptocurrency but most people don’t understand what this has done to the hardware industry. Luckily I built my own computer a few months prior to the huge rise gpu’s.