Abstract

In today's market, large game distribution platforms take a sizable cut of developers' game sales, which significantly impacts indie developers' ability to grow. In the recent GDC State of the industry, it was polled that “just 6% of nearly 4,000 respondents believe that Steam justifies the 30% cut it takes”(Sinclair 2019). Our team created a blockchain network based on Ethereum that functions as the ledger and transaction engine for our digital game distribution platform. This platform creates a marketplace focused on allowing indie game developers to earn a larger cut of their sales. In addition, our platform provides infrastructure by crowd-sourcing hardware from nodes in our network by incentivizing users to host content and provide downloads in return for a small gratuity. Through a combination of Hyperledger frameworks and IBM blockchain technology, we are able to minimize the middleman and shrink the necessary infrastructure to a fraction of traditional methods.