The Play-2-Earn (P2E) gaming industry, which many consider a gateway into Web3.0, is booming. The industry has quite a budding system, which is now mainly characterized by the presence of ‘scholars’ and ‘guilds.’
Scholars are professional players with deep expertise in P2E games. They deeply study the titles they work with, learn the tricks, develop and implement game strategies, and earn a substantial income. Guilds, in turn, aggregate scholars, enabling investors who hold non-fungible token (NFT) assets to rent them out and get a part of the profits.
Still, the current system is proving too crude and inflexible to facilitate the industry's anticipated growth. As a result, innovators are pushing new models that can replace the perceived redundant system, which we will explore below.
To fully grasp the challenges of the P2E gaming industry, it is vital to know the exact role of each stakeholder in the space. There are many pioneering P2E games,
Considering this, several guilds sprang to bring asset owners together with the professional players. While the investor provides the capital that makes playing P2E games feasible, the scholars play and manage the asset.
While this comes off as very simple, here comes the flaw. The current rental system does not allow enough flexibility in a super volatile market because of fixed rental costs and lease terms. Players can rent out assets for a certain period — for example, a week or a month, as the case may be — thereby finding themselves in a no-win situation in the event of a negative market trend.
On top of that, guilds charging exorbitant fees reduce the profitability of P2E games. These two facts lead to a situation where the number of efficient guilds serving the growing ecosystem of P2E gamers is relatively low, which creates a need for new entities to emerge.
A possible solution to this problem is implementing an Asset Management model rather than a traditional rental mechanism and upgrading it to increase the participants' convenience.
For the sake of flexibility, there should be no fixed fees or rent terms, and the investor should be able to call back the asset at any moment. With this model, also known as Play2earn, scholars can rent an NFT for free, play, and then split the earnings with the NFT owner (investor). On the other hand, investors can add this new investment instrument into their toolkit and make money with one click, letting scholars do the work and reap the profit.
To reinforce this model, we can use token staking to bring stability to the economy, create an additional investment opportunity, and support the token price.
As the P2E ecosystem grows, the demand for in-game assets will also continue to grow, so there is a need to create proper support for this system. By building on the current level in which current guilds are offering their services to power the growth in the space, we can strengthen collective efforts by implementing flexible, transparent, and profitable models that can serve both scholars and investors.
Adapted to the current realities, the revenue-sharing model can bring potential economic benefits to users in GameFi and Defi.