The Rise Of Play-To-Earn Games

We all are aware of the history of video gaming from being a diversion, taking your mind off a hard day’s work to today using blockchain technologies like NFTs to reward gamers.

In this world of Play-to-Earn model of video games the player can receive rewards with real-world value. It embraces the concept of an open economy and also provides financial benefits to all players who add value by contributing to the game world. It basically allows gamers to farm or collect cryptocurrency and NFTs that can be sold on the market.

It’s old time when we used to say gamers are someone who wastes their time instead of doing something productive.

It is estimated that by 2025 the global gaming industry is expected to reach a value of $268 billion. The cryptocurrency has moved its foot into this growing segment and has realized the impact that blockchain technology can have on it. NFTs have played a major role in this boom making developers realize that they could be able to create and transfer tangible value in the ecosystem.

The grey marketing gaming in game team is huge and the developers are not being benefited from it. Taking the example of clash of clans, in this game a lot of people used to buy maxed out bases for a good amount of dollars from the other people who had spent their time building those. All these transactions used to take place were peer-to-peer. Now with this new rising technology every time a transaction happens a fee of the transaction goes to the developer making developers also get benefitted. With the rise of play-to-earn games the developers are benefited with storage safety and security of data.

What are play-to-earn games?

Here players can monetize their time while playing video games. The coming up of this blockchain technology and NFTs has quite changed the game. NFTs(unique, rare, and individual), cryptographically tokens that are used to provide us with proof of ownership of content such as images, drawings. Similarly here they enable us to take ownership of in-game items. NFTs here enable you to own the assets that they purchase, allowing you to freely sell it outside of the platform where it was created.

Now these assets or you call it in-game items can be traded and sold on any NFT marketplace. Now you can also incorporate scarcity and increase the prices of these items.

Here you can even participate in this gaming marketplace even if you are not a gamer because of the individual value and trade possibilities it brings along.

Most Popular Play-To-Earn Games

1. Axie infinity

This game has been one of the best in recent times. In this players are able to collect, breed, raise, battle, and even trade token-based creatures such as Axies.

2. Decentraland

This popular game was created by Ariel Meilich and Esteban Ordano.

Basically, a virtual world- a parallel universe that’s running on Ethereum, and players are able to create, experience, and monetize different content and applications. Here the users can trade plots of land. They can also moderate in a way that makes it more attractive, they can build on it and potentially monetize it.

3. The Sandbox

A blockchain virtual world making users earn as they enjoy the game.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) and NFTs combine to create this digital world making its players to build, create, buy, and sell various digital in-item assets in the game.

A step by step guide on play-to-earn games

We will discuss one of the most popular play-to-earn games that is Axie Infinity.

1. You would first require to get an Ethereum based wallet to store the cryptocurrencies. MetaMask is preferred as it is good and easy to navigate along.
2. To store in-game items and assets you will require to set up a ronin wallet. It can be downloaded on the chrome web store.
3. After setting up the ronin wallet, go to Axie marketplace and log in with your ronin wallet to create an account. Now connect the Ethereum based wallet from your account’s ‘account settings’.
4. You will be required to buy three Axies from its marketplace to start playing the game.
5. Once you have activated your account along with the Axies required to start further into the game, you just need to download the game and start playing.  

How do play-to-earn games work?

Play-to-earn falls under the GameFi category because of the mix of gaming and finance, providing financial incentives to play and progress. Earning of income takes place basically in 2 ways.

1. In the game Axie Infinity completing daily quests or battling players you earn in-game cryptocurrencies.
2. Trading or Earning in-game NFTs. Here every NFT may represent an item, a character or another collectable in the game.

There is also another way to earn with earn-to-play games that is staking. In this, users are allowed to lock up NFTs or cryptocurrencies in smart contracts which results in generating rewards.

How are play-to-earn games secured?

The currencies and items reside on the blockchain technology. The blockchain has many properties that prove ownership, legitimacy and rarity. The blockchain network is like an immutable database being maintained by a distributed network of computers. These all hold a copy of the blockchain data. This implies that it is virtually impossible for someone to change, duplicate or even delete blockchain data.

Many a items duplicates in items, gold hacks and other exploits are seen common in traditional games which gets countered here. Rarity of an in-game item’s value is one of the crucial parts. If an item is unique, there is no way for it to be ever replicated. This helps in creating real value for the in-game items.

Axie Infinity 

Axie Infinity is till now one of the biggest play to earn games, it is a Pokemon style monster battling game which was launched in 2018 by indie studio Sky Mavis. The users collects cartoon creatures called Axies which are represented by NFTs. These Axies has their unique strengths and weakness and the players can adventure, battle and breed their Axies as they play. SLP(Smooth love Potion) crypto tokens are rewarded for battling and AXS(Axie Infinity Shard) tokens are used to vote on decisions regarding the game development. With more than 2.8 millions daily users and a total trading volume of $3.8 billion, Axie Infinity has become one of the most dominant play-to-earn games.

Axie also plans to launch free starter Axies with limited earning potential to give the new players a taste of the game. Other play-to-earn projects are merging NFT gaming with elements of decentralised finance. 

Ubisoft, the French video game giant has also announced plans for Ubisoft Quartz, a platform that lets players earn and purchase NFTs based on the Tezos blockchain.

Recently the most notable NFT avatar series Bored Ape Yacht Club has announced an upcoming play to earn game in its new roadmap. A lot of new blockchain projects are trying to make their space in the play to earn market.

Play-to-earn is turning out into a viable business model which allows users to monetize the time they spend on something they enjoy doing and also benefits developers. The world is slowly and slowly turning into the digital space forcing a lot of traditional interactions to go online, making newer faces join the digital world every day.

Disclaimer: This blog has opinionated information which does not make us liable for anything.