# Automate Gaming Royalties and Licensing Settlements

> Microsoft Xbox and EY transferred complex licensing agreements into smart contracts to automate rights and royalties directly into ERP systems, billing, and payment processing. Access to statement data decreased from up to 45 days to approximately four minutes, while overall processing efficiency improved by 99 percent.

**Sector:** Tertiary sector · **Industry:** Gaming and esports · **Organisation:** Microsoft Xbox, EY · **Maturity level:** Production

Canonical URL: https://www.sapientblock.com/en/use-cases/microsoft-xbox-spiele-royalties-lizenzgebuehren-automatisiert-abrechnen

## Documentation status

- **Project status:** Production
- **Evidence:** Evidence medium
- **Editorial review:** pending

## Description

The solution developed by Microsoft Xbox and EY fundamentally modernises the accounting of sales shares for digital games. Instead of manually checking transaction data for weeks, smart contracts record every purchase and immediately determine the correct revenue share for the publishers. This creates a reliable data basis for all contractual partners and ends lengthy disputes over late or incorrect payments.

Microsoft Xbox and the consulting firm EY developed a productive rights management system that automates complex licensing contracts based on Enterprise Ethereum. The system processes sales data directly from the Xbox Store, applies the contractually agreed conditions via smart contracts, and feeds the results into existing ERP structures. Before implementation, it often took up to 45 days of manual review time between sales and final royalty reports. Thanks to the blockchain architecture, the consolidated billing information is now available after around four minutes, representing a 99 percent acceleration in data provision. Game publishers thus gain immediate transparency over their revenues and invoice amounts, while Microsoft significantly reduces operational costs in platform operations.

## Benefits

- Reduction of accounting time from 45 days to four minutes
- Improved liquidity planning for external game publishers
- Audit-proof transparency for financial audits
- 99 percent acceleration of data processing
- Near real-time evaluation of sales and royalty data
- Avoidance of reconciliation errors through immutable smart contracts
- Elimination of manual spreadsheet reconciliations during monthly closings
- Reduced error susceptibility in complex contract variants

## Challenges

- Ensuring absolute confidentiality of sensitive revenue data of competing partners
- Need for reconciliation of individual special conditions outside the standard contract
- Labour-intensive digitisation and standardisation of historical licensing contracts
- High integration complexity when connecting existing enterprise ERP systems
- Need for training in handling blockchain-based accounting processes

## Technology foundation

Enterprise Ethereum / Quorum with smart contracts based on Microsoft Azure Blockchain.

## Sources

- [How blockchain helped a gaming platform become a game changer](https://www.ey.com/en_uk/insights/consulting/how-blockchain-helped-a-gaming-platform-become-a-game-changer)
- [Building with blockchain on Azure](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-with-blockchain-on-azure/)