Gaming, just as many other industries, has undergone massive changes since the day it was invented centuries ago. In the early days, gamers were perceived as lazy members of society. However, as time went by, people started appreciating gaming as an entertainment and educational tool, and it is now estimated that this market will generate $175.8 billion of revenue in 2021.
What is Play2Earn (P2E)?
Many technologies have been tried in gaming to improve the sector and blockchain is amongst the latest technologies that is revolutionizing the sector. Play-to-earn games allow gamers to collect or farm crypto that they can sell on the market. Gamers who play regularly can accumulate items or digital tokens as a source of income.
The gamification of earning can differ from platform to platform. However, most rewards typically come from farming a game’s currency, staking, or generating tradeable non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The older blockchain games applied the random chance technique when rewarding players. On the other hand, play-to-earn games have created business models and in-game economies where players work for an income.
Virtual Economies in P2E
Traditional gaming is not the same as crypto gaming, as the latter involves real money. The play-to-earn model is now allowing users to mix fun with earning an income. How will it feel when you exchange intrinsic rewards like fun for money?
Fun is not as simple as winning. Paying to have fun is not the same as paying to win. Typically, players measure fun/reward on a scale of self-regard and achievement. Incentives are usually deployed in social environments, therefore, paying to win cannot elevate self-regard or constitute an achievement.
According to behavioral economists, the following drivers constitute the underlying architecture of human motivation:
- Drive to acquire — can be NFTs, money
- Bond — such as friends, guilds, DAOs
- Invent — metagames, minigames
- Defend — battles, ideology, territory
Developers must create ways to win considering these drivers of human motivation. Players who are driven by bonding and invention or want to defend will always supply liquidity and subsidize players with the drive to acquire.
Utility maximization along the aforementioned four motivators is usually different for everyone. The game economist must match all heterogeneous preferences with different roles in a typical virtual economy. For an ecosystem to be balanced, it should have the right number of roles for every type of player.
P2E Games
Play-to-earn games are popping up daily. Some of these games focus on breeding NFTs, where a player uses two NFTs to create an offspring NFT. Some games are competitive skill-based that depends on if you win or how you place. It is also likely to find games that combine both mechanics. The following are some of the most popular P2E games:
Axie Infinity
Axie Infinity has been branded as one of the biggest play-to-earn games. This game also can be termed as GameFi as it converges gaming and decentralized finance. Several items are within this game to make playing and earning a reality:
- Axie NFTs — these are the characters used in Axie Infinity.
- AXS and SLP — these are tokens that incentivize users and charge them.
The game’s economic activity relies upon two functions; breeding and battles. A player needs to hold an Axie team (3 Axie NFTs) to participate in a battle. Players will get rewarded with Small Love Portion (SLP) tokens after winning. There is a ranking mechanism that ranks the best players and rewards them with Axie tokens every month.
Players interact with the network to spend SLP and AXS tokens through breeding (where they generate more NFTs for themselves). The players are then anticipated to stake their tokens. Such players thus earn through winning SLP or AXS tokens or the sale of NFTs.
The Sandbox
Sandbox is a virtual world where players own and customize 166,000 plots of land. These land plots are represented by NFTs and landowners can decide to build virtual museums or games or whatever suits them.
Voxels are what makes the world of The Sandbox, making it somewhat similar to Minecraft. Sandbox offers everyone a chance to create a game and earn SAND tokens after completing quests. Everyone in Sandbox’s ecosystem can contribute and earn rewards.
The Sandbox has 3 major components:
- VOXEDIT 3D voxel art animation software — build NFT game assets.
- Game Maker Tool — create gaming experiences in the Sandbox Metaverse.
- Marketplace — buying and selling NFT assets.
Illuvium — Coming 2022
This is an open-world RPG adventure game that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Players are put on a journey across vast and varied landscapes on their quest to hunt and capture creatures known as Illuvials. Players earn $ILV, and there are more than 100 Illuvials in this alien world. Each of these Illuvials comes with different classes, affinities, and abilities. Your task is to capture them, fuse them, and discover more powerful ones as you continue to earn.
What are Guilds?
Guilds are communities that allow patrons to contribute to support the open-source ecosystems that allow them to be successful. In this case, gaming guilds offer a platform where gamers can contribute to improving various games and loan assets to players to lower the economic barrier to entry.
Guilds are also there to incentivize those new to blockchain or junior software engineers to learn the best practices of the community. Such developers also get a platform where experienced players can mentor them.
Yield Guild Games
YGC is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) for investing in NFTs used in blockchain-based games and virtual worlds. YGC does the following:
- Creates a global community of gamers who engage competitively in play-to-earn games and collect in-game rewards.
- Creates a community where users participate in the DAO by voting and passing proposals.
- Produce revenue through the sale or rental of YGG-owned NFT assets for a markup. For instance, players can resell land in The Sandbox or rent Axies to various players through a model known as scholarship.
- Coordinate research and development for gamers in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization to arbitrage yield generation.
Money earned through the Guild is distributed between players, managers, and the Guild.
Managers acting on behalf of the Guild will identify various scholars and loan them assets to play games with.
Gamers that partner with YGC find a robust and talented community that is well conversant with blockchain gaming.
TheNeoGuild
TheNeoGuild is a community that seeks to build, empower and educate society about blockchain and its various applications. The community aims to break the barriers of the adoption of blockchain-based games and allow players to earn. The guild supports scholars through scholarships that it announces often.