The $120 billion video game industry employs some of the brightest creative and technological minds. The royalty process of Microsoft Xbox meant that game publishers faced some unique challenges because of a legacy technologies limitations. This is while this marriage of creativity and technology was bringing enjoyment to the masses.
The gaming industry serves over 2.7 billion consumers worldwide. Collaborations between gaming platforms like Xbox and thousands of publishers, developers, authors, designers, production houses, and distributors make this possible. These relationships are all key in maintaining a high-quality product and attracting the best talent and creators to the platform.
The legacy system for securing and managing royalty processing of Microsoft Xbox was cumbersome. It takes 45 days to access validated financial information about royalties earned. Together with paperwork, this was not giving the best experience to many game publishers, especially the ones with small businesses and limited resources.
EY and Microsoft asked themselves if the blockchain could be a game-changer for the gaming industry? This is because the team wanted to help the gaming industry play fair.
Together as a team, Microsoft Xbox and EY worked together to help deliver a transformation. The joint capabilities of Microsoft and EY, as well as suite of digital solutions became a game-changer. It helps Microsoft Xbox reduce the manual efforts and the operational hours related with processing royalties for publishers via automation of the royalties processing. This starts to transition off the legacy system.
To onboard royalty contracts onto blockchain in the form of digital contracts is the first step in refreshing the legacy systems of Microsoft. The blockchain network then encoded the legal terms in the form of smart contracts. Industry participants can review and validate that onboarded digital contracts are the same as the royalty contracts in a confidential manner by opting in.
