The Future of Play to Earn vs The Present
My opinions on the current state of Play to Earn games and what the future could offer
THE PAST
Anyone who developed an interest in online gaming over the past decade would most likely have come across the term “Pay to Win”. The term first appeared in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when game developers began incorporating in-game purchases into their free-to-play video games.
Today, Pay to Win has become an infamous term in the gaming world. Users and players are willing to pay a small fee to access features that are normally unlocked as the game progresses. This presents an unfair balancing issue within online games. Although competitive gamers didn’t welcome this development, it provided a means of monetization for game developers and studios.
In the same years, the controversy surrounding loot boxes hit all-time highs. Most games offered players the opportunity to buy loot boxes that contained special rewards. At the start, loot boxes gained some success as there was a lot of hype surrounding their opening. YouTubers gained more views for simply opening loot boxes in their videos, but this hype drew significant attention to the uncertainty of the contents in these boxes. Gambling was the word being thrown around as cases of people being dissatisfied with rewards they got after spending large amounts of money on these boxes began to spring up.
Then came season passes or what most people know today as a battle or game pass. Season passes were first implemented by Valve, the parent company of the popular online multiplayer battle arena game, Dota2. It wasn’t even called a Season Pass, but a Compendium. The company needed more money for its international event and this Pass was the best way of generating money without introducing a Pay to Win system into the game. The pass offered only aesthetic items like skins, emotes, voice lines, and so on and was spread out across a tiered system that encouraged players to spend more time completing challenges in the game.
The efficiency of this new model didn’t go unnoticed by other popular titles, and it wasn’t long before they started implementing it too. In 2018, Epic Games added one in Fortnite, when the game was in its second season and had a lot of new players joining. Needless to say, it proved to be very successful. Today, pretty much every online multiplayer title has some sort of Battle Pass, usually seasonal.
THE PRESENT
The future of gaming is undoubtedly moving towards blockchain games, and this future holds a lot of promises. The most important promise is an opportunity for gamers to earn money from what they love doing best. But the current landscape of blockchain gaming doesn’t seem to be moving in this direction.
Like the Pay to Win era of gaming, blockchain games today seem to be moving towards the loot box system. There’s so much uncertainty on what the future of these games could look like, yet we keep seeing huge amounts of money being pumped into these games.
After taking a detailed look at the top 4 blockchain games (Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Alien Worlds) based on market cap and active users, I found a couple of things that they all had in common;
1. Some form of entry barrier
Three of these games had monetary barriers, with The Sandbox having by far the highest. The company’s first public gameplay event went live on November 29th this year, with access to the event granted through an NFT ticket called the Alpha Pass. Alpha Passes were to be gifted to 5000 “lucky” individuals. One thousand of these were up for grabs in a raffle for Sandbox Landowners, and 2,250 more were to be given out to Sandbox account holders via daily social contests over a three-week period. Alpha passes at the launch of this event were selling for an average price of about 2.7 ETH and are currently selling for about 1.8 ETH at the time of writing this article.
Cross over to Axie Infinity next where new players are required to buy at least three Axies to take part in the game. The cheapest Axie on the games marketplace costs about $95 and remember, three Axies are needed, so it’s approximately $285 to get started in the game. The only other options players have when it comes to getting Axies is through guilds offering scholarship programs and I’ll tell you out of personal experience that getting a scholarship from one of these guilds isn’t an easy task.
Decentraland had no monetary entry barrier but it required users to connect their noncustodial wallet to access the game. In Alien Worlds on the other hand, players are required to stake upwards of 40–80 WAX ($20–$40) to play somewhat comfortably.
2. Land emphasis
All four of these games offer virtual land, allowing buyers to own some form of digital real estate. Over the past year, we've seen an explosion in the value of digital land and it seems like it's becoming a trend for blockchain games to incorporate some form of digital land into their gameplay even if there isn't any clear pathway as to how it may affect players and developers in the future. Land in these games seems to be drawing attention away from important features like actual gameplay.
3. Low coverage
Low coverage across platforms was something I came across a few times while looking at these games. On Twitch, the highest coverage out of all four games was Axie Infinity, but it only had an average of 1.9k viewers daily with the most popular streamer averaging only 573 viewers.
The Sandbox Alpha event is the best look at what the platform’s gameplay could look like and one would expect a lot of gamers to be covering this event on YouTube but this is not the case. I was only able to find one person (out of a thousand landowners who were given early access) covering the event on YouTube. This probably suggests that landowners in the game only bought land for investment purposes without the intention of playing the game.
I also discovered that most content released for these games was around topics like investment opportunities, not gameplay. This should bring up major concerns as gameplay should be the number one priority of any game.
It’s disappointing to see that like most things in crypto today, a larger percentage of benefits go to early investors. This shouldn’t be the case for games. Blockchain games today feel like DeFi applications; there’s so much emphasis placed on value generation for investors and not gameplay for actual players. You can’t scroll past four tweets on the Twitter profiles of these games without coming across land sale announcements. It’s unfortunately rare to see new gameplay features getting announced.
This has a lot of resemblance to the pay-to-win era of gaming. With entry barriers so high in blockchain games today, it sounds more like pay to earn, not the play-to-earn gamers have been promised.
THE FUTURE
For someone who feels video games are the path to mass adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I'm disappointed by what these games have to offer today. Many would suggest that we’re still in very early stages and a lot of work is yet to be done, but I strongly believe that what we have today is very far from what the Play-to-Earn era of gaming will eventually look like.
I believe the most successful games of the Play to Earn era will not be games that are built on blockchain like we have today but traditional games that merge the legacy gaming system with the blockchain sector. Games that utilize blockchain technology to create digital scarcity, tradable items (NFTs) on secondary markets, and cryptocurrencies inside the game. Free-to-Play games with an emphasis on gameplay and competitiveness to earn.
The peak of this promised era would be one where individuals are easily onboarded unto games can and earn value solely through skill and determination using technology understandable and accessible to them. Games that can provide value for developers without distorting gameplay balance. Blockchain gaming needs an escape from this current cycle, its form of “Battle Pass”, and this is where I see real value. I don’t know why but I see this coming from an already popular game, maybe Fortnite, Zelda, Warzone, whatever really. It could be anyone but the question is who is ready to take the risk?
- Thanks for reading. I’d love to thank Hillary Omitogun for her contribution to this article.
- Please, this is just my wild opinion and it could change at any point. I'm very open to hearing opinions from other people. Also, while you're here, please check out my previous articles.
