“If you don’t pay me, I won’t play anymore”: why for some play-to-earn is the future of video games

Alexis Onahian, co-founder of Reddit, has it clear. For him in five years “90% of people will not play a video game unless that time is properly valued.” His prediction is one that shakes the foundations of the gaming world, and according to him it will come true in the next five years.

This entrepreneur firmly believes in the model “Play-to-Earn“, a paradigm in which many players will no longer play for the pleasure of playing: they will play for money, and more specifically for cryptocurrencies. It is another of the many revolutions in the crypto world, and one that has important collateral effects.

Gaming 3.0: what is the Play-to-Earn model

Last summer we were already talking about ‘Axie Infinity’, a benchmark in this new way of understanding the world of video games. The evolution of this juicy segment has been singular. Until not long ago, what we could describe as Gaming 1.0 prevailed: players played to play, for the sheer pleasure of enjoying.

Then came the Gaming 2.0: the phenomenon of Freemium games. Players could download and play a game completely free of charge, but if they wanted to enjoy all the game’s options — new weapons, clothes, items — or progress faster, they had to pay for it — long live the ‘pay to win’ — and buy items in that game. Fortnite is a good example of those mechanics.

That is the prevailing model until now. It has made mobile games, for example, achieve spectacular revenues, and they have become an absolute success in those video games that manage to succeed. And yet, there are those who believe that this model’s days are numbered.

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What will come next will be something like the Gaming 3.0: el fenómeno Play-to-Earn. A model according to which players can earn money in the form of cryptocurrencies or also tokens and NFTs when they play. Not only will they not have to pay to play: the companies will pay them to do so. This is what will happen in the next five years according to Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.

this entrepreneur asserted in a recent episode from the podcast “The Room Where it Happens” that paying to play will in many cases be an anachronism:

“Five years from now you will really value your time properly. Instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced and spending [montones de] dollars to buy stupid hammers that you don’t have, you’ll be playing some equivalent game on the chain that will be just as much fun, but you’ll actually gain value and be the one to reap [ingresos]”.

Welcome to the crypto economy of attention

How is that possible? So how do companies make money? The easiest way to understand it is with the aforementioned example. In ‘Axie Infinity’, players raise their little pets —which are NFTs, like the famous crypto kittens— and make them fight with other characters: money can be earned by feeding and raising them or by winning those battles with other pets.

Screenshot 2022 01 19 At 16 42 10

AXS valuation in dollars. Source: CoinMarketCap.

The catch is that each of those pets costs a lot of money. The game is free to play and you can indeed earn money, but the barrier to entry is high. The model works: the token of this particular Axie metaverse, called AXS, grew spectacularly last fall, and although in recent months its value has fallen to half of those highs, analysts believe that it will grow again dramatically. remarkable.

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The Play-to-Earn model has other important differences from the current model. Imagine that you spend hundreds of hours playing a video game like Fortnite: you will have ended up investing money to equip your character with clothes, new weapons or new abilities. All great until you realize that if the game is abandoned or disappears, all that collection of items and abilities will be lost forever: not transferable.

The player is at the mercy of what the developers and distributors decide.

Pte

Show me the pasta.

With the Play-to-Earn model, games put the player at the center of their economic (or rather, crypto-economic) engine. Players own those digital assets—such as NFTs— and they can exchange them for money, for other NFTs or collect them and hope that over time they will increase in value – although obviously they can also decrease in value or be zero.

There are other theoretical advantages: in games based on the block chain there is a decentralization that should mean that even the players may end up having decision-making power when it comes to shaping the future of those video games. In the end, it is a model in which the distribution of income is theoretically much more distributed. The game rewards you for your time, for the attention you give it, and that has interesting implications.

Greg Isenberg, analyst and adviser on Reddit – he is the host of the podcast in which Ohanian was interviewed – explained, for example, how the recent multi-million dollar agreement between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard had made the 70,000 million of dollars simply passed from one hand to another without the users having seen any benefit.

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For him that was unfair, because after all Activision Blizzard would not be where it is without the users -Microsoft either, logically-. In that speech there is an important retort made by a Twitter user: “People who play video games are rewarded. Constantly. P2E [Play-to-Earn] it’s a job. I play video games to not work. What a disappointing future that is.”

His argument was valid and of course he posits a future in which playing could end up becoming a job: you would no longer play for the mere fact of enjoying yourself, but rather for an economic objective, as happens with work. It will be interesting to see where all this ends up, but certainly the Play-to-Earn model seems to be a plausible alternative if cryptocurrencies, blockchains and all things “crypto” end up in this and other segments.



Reference-www.xataka.com