There's no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.

There's a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that it's a complicated topic outside of their reach, but it's honestly not. Like any technology, there's two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if you're a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know it's an append only database with a fully public history. That's all it is. So ask yourself how you could ever make that an interesting part of a game that would entice players to ... anything really. At best/worst it'll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games aren't clamoring for.

But more to the point, anything stored in a database needs to be actionable by a governing body. In terms of videogames, this is the game itself. The game is the authority on what can and can't be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you can't change the rules of the game, they're hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if I'm making my points clear enough, but does that follow? There's zero benefit to the public blockchain vs. an internal database because the game is the final authority and going to action on it the same either way. Owning something on the blockchain is useless, anyone who knows anything about games at all always knew that line about transferring items between games is total BS.

Any cryptobros already furiously typing out a response, don't bother. I'll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but I've heard most of the arguments before and they just don't even bear responding to so ya know ...

It's all just buzzword bingo.

We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!

That's just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.

You can transfer game items from one game to another game!

This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn't really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.

The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I'm not convinced of myself), games aren't one of them.

The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto "millionaires/billionaires" need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin "fortunes" into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of "the future" (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).

Yeah I've been wondering the same thing too, like what's the point? I've seen some devs try to use blockchain for tracking ownership of items, so you could trade/sell items to others and it would all be tracked and verified through the blockchain. But if you're playing a game that's hosted by a centralized server, then just use a database. I don't see any benefit for a decentralized blockchain when you're playing on a centralized server.

The only justification I’ve ever been able to think of is Pokémon. The idea is supposed to be that every Pokémon is unique but there’s actually only a limited set of variables to define each individual ‘mon. I can trade you a Zubat I just caught and it can be identical to one that I first caught in Fire Red twenty years ago and have traded through every game since.

If each Pokémon was truly unique and on the blockchain, it could be meaningful in ways they currently aren’t. There could be only one Coalossal that Wolfe Glick won the Player’s Cup with. He could trade it away for charity and someone would pay for it. I could trade Pokémon away and track them as they’re traded around the world.

It’d be cool. But it would not meaningfully make the game more fun. And it’s Nintendo so they’re never going to do blockchain. And that is the best pitch I can give you.

Simple rule of thumb; any time someone says blockchain in a sentence, replace it with "big slow database". Now you can think about it clearly.

The most successful example for a blockchain game is "Axie Infinity" which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique "Axies" (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like "Axie Infinity" was "play-to-earn", games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in "Axie Infinity".

Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.

The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.

As a footnote: The use of blockchain in "Axie Infinity" ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.

It's only purpose is to monetize your gameplay time with some kind of real world "value".

Everything else is just the lies they tell you to get away with enshitifying the game.

So far it seems to be to make money off gold grinding in the Philippines if Axie Infinity is any indication.

It's mostly hype from the marketing team pushed onto developers. 90% of use cases of block chain are just over eager MBAs pushing developers to add blockchain so they can be excited about it.

For this, it's probably NFTs, which are guaranteed to be unique, but... the cool thing about blockchain is that the guarantee is true even in a decentralized service. A video game company is centralized, they can make whatever they want unique already. So it's 99% likely to just be a buzzword.

There are some really good uses of blockchain. A decentralized steam-like platform would be amazing. A decentralized venmo/paypal. The ownership of a game would be great to have on a blockchain so even if a company goes out of business you can still say you own this game. Any game mechanics themselves are stupid.

Most of the supposed benefits of blockchain in gaming would either never actually be realized due to the infeasibility, or would be just as easily implemented using alternative, pre-existing methods.

There are a few ways to do it. As one mentioned, trading of in-game assets. Additionally, some games want to become "Play to Earn". Essentially the more you play their game, the more buttcoin (made-up coin to use for this conversation) you earn which then you can trade somewhere for real money. It's like when you play CSGO for years and end up with 350 dollars in steam from selling all those free cases they just give you at the end of a match so you end up buying a steam deck for essentially free... So going back to blockchain, essentially, actions in a game can get you more or less coins. Like you are playing a buttcoin miner.

So I've seen a few storefronts try to implement this for all games in their store. That way if you play a game, you earn buttcoin, take that buttcoin to buy a new game.

Utsumi is right though. Buttcoin implementations will not make a game more or less boring. It's an economy system implementation and most people don't find the economy as a fun thing.