Games are one of the most profitable industries on the planet at the moment, and companies are always looking for new ways to simplify their transactions. There is an astonishing number of game developers that are involved with Microsoft, and each sale of the game must be counted towards the calculation of payments. Corporations like Microsoft pay publishers, but those calculations were difficult to process beforehand. Surprisingly, Microsoft used a manual method based on spreadsheets.
Unfortunately, this process usually took 45 days and many smaller editors did not understand. There was no way to know how much you were doing in real time. Having this information is necessary to adjust sales and marketing strategy, especially if the result is not what an editor expected.
Fortunately, Microsoft developed a new system that uses blockchain technology. If you are familiar with Bitcoin, you may know what blockchain is. The blockchain is a system that keeps track of transactions in bitcoin or other currency on multiple computers that are linked to a peer-to-peer network. This essentially means that you can compress the time it takes for each publisher/creator to calculate payments. Microsoft developed a blockchain-based solution that provides near real-time royalty information. This means that publishers don’t have to wait for months to see how their game is working.
According to a Microsoft report, the “calculation process is now more transparent, instils greater confidence, provides publishers with useful business information and reduces the efforts of the process”.
Rohit Amberker, the CFO of Royalties and Content Operations at Microsoft, said that the old “offline royalty payment solution that stakeholders have used for years is based on paper documents and spreadsheets. It’s expensive to administer. The Blockchain solution not only benefits publishers by speeding up the information they receive but is also cheaper to manage for Microsoft. Looks like everybody wins in this situation.
The report concluded that Amberker and his team are leveraging blockchain technology to provide “open and efficient confidence in Xbox’s royalty payment process. This is just another way that Microsoft Azure helps the games division and its associated parties.