The giant Garuda statue in Bali.
The giant Garuda statue in Bali.
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The DeanBeat: Indonesia’s growing game economy leans toward blockchain

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Indonesia is pretty serious about building its game ecosystem, and it hopes that blockchain games — potentially as disruptive as mobile free-to-play games were a decade ago — could be the way to build a sustainable game industry.

The Southeast Asian nation of 17,000 islands might seem like one of the underdogs of gaming. The country’s industry isn’t nearly as advanced as a lot of would-be superpowers of gaming, such as the U.S., Japan, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.