Accepting Cryptocurrency As Payment For Games

[SilverSpook]

To any gamedevs who've sold product in the past, do you have any experience in or view on taking cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, et. al.) as a form of payment? 

I'm looking into distribution options for my game (Neofeud) and am looking at the potential for accepting crypto, as it can allow near-zero fee cuts for middlemen.  And I'm a fan of'em myself.

Thanks for any advice in advance guys. 

[CaptainD]

I've thought about this a few times myself.  Currently there seem to be 3 logical options:

1 - use a service such as https://www.coinpayments.net/ to accept crypto payments in various coins (I have to admit their list of supported coins seems a little odd to me - certainly BTC, LTC, ETHER, Blackcoin, DASH, DOGE, LISK etc you can perfectly understand, no-brainers really, maybe even BitBean and Darknet to an extent, but Myriadcoin, GameCredits and a few others made me raise my eyebrows slightly, especially as Myriacoin appears to be particular prone to pump and dumps, but still, the more the merrier I guess.  Downside is you will have fees to pay.

2 - deal with it manually - set an arbitrary price and accept direct payments to your own wallets, and manually send the game once you've had enough confirmations.  Downside is the value of the coin will fluctuate without warning of course.

4 - if you're good enough at coding to make your own system of tracking prices against an established exchange ie Poloniex, and automating payments received and sent.  You would probably need to use hot wallets for this, and if you accept several currencies, you could be using a lot of CPU time keeping all your wallets synched.

(In short I've yet to be convinced that I want to do  any of the above.  I might have missed something.  With Steam said to be accepting Bitcoin in some form (can't remember if this has already happened or has merely been announced as something that will happen) I expect a lot of gamers to open up to the idea of using cryptos.  But how widespread the practice will become is very uncertain.

[SilverSpook]

Thanks for the input, CaptainD!  That's pretty much exactly the info I was looking for.

I'm thinking about going with option 2, dealing with it manually.

Unless I start selling tens or hundreds of thousands of copies, this shouldn't be too hard.

The way things are, I like having that Patreon-style, personal connection with the fans / supporters.  I'm thinking I might even do some sort of custom-crafted message or award or gif-sticker or something for those who buy the game through crypto.  To make it a little more worthwhile, I'm thinking of even giving a 5% or even 10% discount -- the transaction fees are already cut out with bitcoin.

This sort of paying-it-forward mentality is great and has a way of mulitplying itself.  I figure there are is a large overlap on the Venn diagram of 'people who would like Neofeud' and 'people who use cryptocurrency for personal / ideological / ethical reasons'.  And so giving people that option might be appreciated and have knock-on effects.

[CaptainD]

Yeah the only difficulty with that is (potentially) keeping track of the price changes.  But if you use only the major coins you theoretically should be safer from this.  I guess you could update the price every day.  Or just set an arbitrary figure that you're relatively happy with irrespective of how much the value goes up or down.

I do think there's a LOT of potential for video gaming and crypto working together, but they seem to be largely two different entities only vaguely aware of each other's existence at this point.

One other thing you might want to factor in is if using a POS coin the total will become greater than the sum of its parts (although again this requires leaving the wallet open so that it can stake, which you may not always want to do).  I tried Blackcoin which seems very good but you need a huge amount to have a reasonable chance of staking even over 24 hours.

[SilverSpook]

Yeah calculating an exact number down to the cent is not really a huge deal for me.  I find fussing about that stuff can be counterproductive while just trying to build the fanbase / community for an indie project. 

There are some simple calculation widgets though that convert price of BTC or other crypto to USD that can update automatically though.  Then people can watch stock graphs and speculate on the price of Neofeud.  Play the dystopian futures market (hopefully it stays in a bull market!  lol).