Blockchain-Secure Gaming Environments: A Comprehensive Survey

The gaming industry, which predominantly depends on centralized platforms, faces growing challenges in protecting digital assets, ensuring gameplay fairness, and addressing online fraud. Conventional gaming systems store player data on centralised servers, including sensitive financial and personal information, making them particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks and security breaches. With gaming transactions frequently occurring on unsecured mobile and desktop platforms, player accounts are often at risk of theft, hacking, and fraud. These security vulnerabilities result in significant financial losses for players and developers, underscoring the urgent need for a secure, transparent, decentralized solution. In light of these challenges, adopting blockchain technology in gaming platforms has emerged as a promising and transformative solution. Blockchain’s decentralized and immutable ledger offers enhanced security, making it nearly impossible for malicious actors to manipulate transaction records or steal digital assets. Research and practical implementations have shown that blockchain can effectively reduce online fraud by securely storing in-game assets and transactions on decentralized networks, ensuring their integrity and resistance to tampering. This paper makes several significant contributions to understanding how blockchain technology can revolutionize the gaming industry. First, it provides a comprehensive analysis of blockchain’s security advantages, emphasizing its capacity to reduce online fraud and enhance the protection of digital assets. Second, the paper explores how blockchain enhances player autonomy by establishing secure digital identities and tokenising in-game assets. By enabling players to own, trade, and exchange their assets directly, blockchain fosters a decentralized gaming economy that grants players greater control over their virtual possessions. Finally, the paper identifies emerging trends and potential research avenues in blockchain-enabled gaming, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field.