How Play-to-Earn is Evolving Into Play-and-Earn

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oddz finance

5 min readMay 9, 2022

When you are an adult, your love for gaming is misinterpreted as slacking. You spend hours calculating your every move and battling it out against rivals, only to sell it short as a hobby.

Luckily, things have changed a lot in the last couple of years. The play-to-earn movement has empowered gamers to turn their passion for gaming into money. P2E projects are redefining the industry with dynamic incentivization mechanisms powered by cryptocurrencies and NFTs. In fact, it is a source of livelihood for many gamers.

Amid the newfound enthusiasm and earning potential, a bizarre movement is stirring up in the gaming community. It calls for the transition of play-TO-earn to play-AND-earn.

Now, what’s this all about?

Play-to-earn vs Play-and-earn

Play-to-earn and play-and-earn are two branches of GameFi. They both combine gaming and finance on a blockchain foundation, rewarding users for their time and gaming skills. However, their priorities set them apart. If play-to-earn focuses on the earning potential of a game, play-and-earn focuses on playability. Many in the gaming industry believe that the latter approach will cater to the long-term growth of a project. We need a shift of focus from squeezing money out of games to bringing traditional gamers onboard.

Speculation Steals a Game’s Thunder

Crypto play-to-earn games garnered massive attention in the initial phases. Pioneers like Axie Infinity and Decentraland witnessed rapid growth in the following years as more features rolled out. Investors and gamers were betting big on these projects, the prices of AXS, MANA, and SAND among other gaming tokens surged, especially as they integrated the metaverse vision.

However, speculation often outstrips gaming mechanics today. Taking inspiration from the success of prominent P2E games, the market has churned out a myriad of projects with cosmic promises. Interestingly, they focus more on NFT offerings and the DeFi use cases of the crypto tokens than the game. This makes sense, as most projects rely on crypto VCs and

retail investors for funding, and it’s important to keep them motivated. The incentivization mechanisms go a long way in that. But game development gets lost In the hoo-ha around token sales and NFT launches.

The recent downturn in the market throws light on the incompetence of many of these projects, including front-runners like Axie Infinity.

(Credits: https://activeplayer.io/axie-infinity/)

If the number of users on Axie Infinity has been picking up at a slower pace earlier, the game is losing players now. The trend began even before the Ronin attack. Gaming tokens and NFTs are subject to a dramatic drop in value as well.

SAND (Sandbox) is down 74.70% from its all-time high in November. GODS (Gods Unchained) has lost more than 90% since December 2021. AXS (Axie Infinity) and SLP (Smooth Love Potion) are down 81% and 96% respectively. Clearly, investors are losing interest.

(Credits: CoinMarketcap)

When you’re in a game for the game, the dipping prices of NFTs and tokens wouldn’t bother you. In fact, you would seize the opportunity to step up your game.

The recent trends open our eyes to the fact that investors are not the driving force behind a game. Gamers are. Unless projects focus on getting them on board, they will bite the dust before the game takes off.

Fun is the Only Way Forward

Video gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry, valued at USD 198.40 billion in 2021. Play-to-earn games only make up a small percentage of it. Clearly, gaming is sustainable, regardless of whether players are financially rewarded or not. Crypto incentivization can catalyze the growth of the industry, yes. But the ultimate reward is the gaming experience.

We need fun, engaging games to break into mainstream gamers. At present, crypto games are more of a job than a source of entertainment. The ridiculous prices of NFTs and crypto tokens make them inaccessible to gamers with low initial capital. Moreover, they fail to build loyal gaming communities. P2E games have a long way to go beyond DeFi, staking, and yield farming to keep up with AAA games.

And that is what play-and-earn games are all about. The new approach will remodel crypto and NFT games for traditional gamers, further emphasizing the core features of blockchain technology. As the game succeeds in getting gamers hooked, crypto incentivization, DAO governance, gaming guilds, and NFT ownership will fall into place.

Exploring Beyond Gaming

The term ‘play-and-earn’ deceives us into thinking that GameFi is limited to video games. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. We can integrate crypto incentivization mechanisms into a wide range of industries like sports, cinema, e-commerce, and trading without losing sight of the long-term goals of the projects.

Oddz, for example, is a DeFi derivatives platform that has exciting reward systems in place as a means to fuel engagement. As you may know, derivatives are intimidating, even for seasoned investors. The complex nature of the assets stands in the way of their mass adoption, despite the stellar earning potential. And crypto volatility adds to the apprehension. In reality, derivatives are an excellent hedge against volatility.

How do you bring people into a relatively novel industry and make them see it for what it is? They need a nudge. Oddz successfully demonstrated how traditional investors can be motivated to try their hands on DeFi derivatives through a customized play-and-earn model. We are currently working on integrating crypto-based gamification to our new product, which will soon be launching.

To stay updated on the latest developments, visit Oddz.

About Oddz

Oddz is a trustless on-chain options trading platform that expedites the execution of call and put options contracts, conditional trades, and futures. It allows the creation, maintenance, execution, and settlement of trustless option contracts, conditional tokens agreements, and futures contracts in a fast, secure, and flexible manner.

It employs the synergies of Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, and Polygon to unleash the potential of a decentralized options market. It focuses on building solutions that can propel the DeFi ecosystem by simplifying options trading and enhancing the user experience.