Why Brian Fargo thinks blockchain is key to an alternative PC game store

Veteran game publisher Brian Fargo and other game industry veterans announced a plan to shake up PC digital game purchases this week with the announcement of Robot Cache and its planned cryptocurrency, dubbed Iron.

Their idea comes amid a sometimes hot, sometimes not — but always volatile — market for cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. Fargo’s plan to stage an initial coin offering (ICO) raised a lot of eyebrows among the 1,400 attendees to the Casual Connect USA 2018 event this week in Anaheim, California, where blockchain sessions were quite popular. Fargo’s new company will create a digital PC games platform as an alternative to Valve’s Steam digital distribution service.

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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.