The Potential of Game-Fi Airdrops
While most people get into Game-Fi for the pay to play or the play to earn premise, there is another way to go about making money in Game-Fi that is not only less talked about, but is often much more rewarding than the typical style of playing to make money. That way is called airdrops, and while they are more common in the DeFi space than they are in the Game-Fi space, there is still a surplus of opportunities to make bank in 2022 through these lucrative mechanisms.
Airdrops have been in the news before because of the sheer volume of money freely distributed for hardly any work.
So, what are airdrops exactly?
Simply put, projects will introduce a native token into their ecosystem and reward people who have used their ecosystem in the past by dropping their new token into the users wallets, thus the term airdrop. Airdrops are incredibly popular because they benefit both sides, with the users of the platform getting free tokens that can be extremely valuable, as well as the ecosystem getting a bountiful number of users now actively holding or using the tokens within the project.
Take AVAX, for example, if you interacted with the Avalanche ecosystem before a certain date, they “airdropped” users AVAX coins worth up to around $110,000 USD. While there has yet to be any sort of major airdrop of that scale in the Game-Fi community, that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential in the space for it to occur. Historically speaking, Game-Fi has not been known for airdrops, but new projects are emerging that are changing our perception of the industry.
Just this month, play to earn game Pixels announced an airdrop to the top 20,000 users on their platform based on points, and the top players would be rewarded with their new tokens, PIXEL and BERRY. This airdrop is unique because even if you had never interacted with the platform before, you still had a chance to be eligible for the airdrop. This is the major advantage that Game-Fi projects are able to use to their advantage that other projects just can’t do, such as DeFi.
Having a Game-Fi ecosystem in place allows for a tremendous amount of growth through the introduction of a native token, because it draws in more users than a project would ever be able to get on their own without such incentives. Even if most users stop playing after the airdrop, the project’s name is now known and there will still undoubtedly be a player base for those that joined to get the airdrop but stayed because they genuinely enjoy the game and its economy.
I joined Pixels after hearing about the airdrop and even though I didn’t end up getting an airdrop, I still play the game because I genuinely enjoy it along with many others. Pixels managed to draw in hundreds of thousands of players through the simple announcement of an airdrop.
Airdrops are a fantastic source of publicity for projects that genuinely need a native token for their ecosystem. One of the biggest Achilles heels for Game-Fi projects is the fact that they are notoriously bad at PR. Most projects die before anyone ever hears about them. While this is true in almost all aspects of Web 3, it is much harder for the true gems of Game-Fi to emerge than in other aspects of Web 3 because it’s significantly harder to grow an active user base relative to DeFi and exchanges and such.
Airdrops of the future?
While projects like Pixels took the clever route to announce the airdrop ahead of time to grow their user base, that doesn’t mean every project will take that route as well, so let’s highlight some helpful tips to find projects with potential in the future.
There are platforms like Meta DAO Guild that highlight new projects that are up-and-coming but most of the time these games already have native tokens in their ecosystem.
The best steps to acquiring an airdrop is surfing the web for up-and-coming projects that don’t have a crazy huge user base and still have potential to grow and most importantly, have a need and an eventual plan to introduce a native token to their economy.
From my deep dive research and time in the Web 3 space, I have found some unique projects with an incredibly small user base but massive upside potential. One of these projects is Akiverse, a game with plans to introduce both a supply token and a governance token. While Akiverse doesn’t plan to do an airdrop, they still plan to have a reward system for its first adopters.
Projects like these are where the best airdrops or rewards can come from because they give you the ability to get in early and you know for a fact that they plan to introduce tokens to the ecosystem. It may take time, but surf the web for the next big Game-Fi project and you just might end up getting the next massive airdrop.
Not Financial Advice. Information is the Author’s Perspective Alone.
Written By: Blake Doersch
Edited By: Matt Farrow
