Microsoft shift royalty and digital rights payments to the blockchain

Microsoft has unveiled its new system for dealing with royalty and digital rights payments and, as it’s 2018, it’s run on the blockchain.

This shouldn’t make a huge difference to the way Xbox publishers actually recieve their payments, but as the company revealed that it was largely done by a team of people looking at PDF files, Excel spreadsheets and printed documents to work out how much to pay out, there’s a chance the blockchain system, run on Quorom, could see payments made faster.

Blockchain is often tied up in discussion of cryptocurrency, but ultimately it’s best to think of blockchain like a permanent digital ledger of transactions that tracks when data was stored, what the data was and who stored it.

This will allow greater visibility to those waiting for their royalty payments, with immediate access to see how their payments are being calculated and how much they can expect, whereas currently they’re waiting 45 days for a statement to arrive.

All in all, a more transparent system that should be more useful to Triple-A publishers, indie developers and everyone in between that sells games using a Microsoft-owned platform.