Play To Earn is a favorite subject nowadays, with the explosion from Axie Infinity. Axie does not only captivates a massive number of players from many countries, but it also shows to the world the promising profit that Play To Earn can bring to participants. In this series, we will find out about this hot trend.
What Is Play To Earn?
Play To Earn is a model for games where players can earn real money or other rewards by playing.
But earning real money from playing games is not something new, it happened a long time ago like selling in-game items in WoW, or players can earn the money from participating and winning the tournament.
Why Play To Earn Exists Already But Recently Becoming Mainstream?
The explosion of Play To Earn goes with the advantages that bring:
Using the NFT technology as the basis
The true ownership
NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a unique token, non-interchangeable, and non-replaceable for another token. NFT represents items or assets that can be collective, that’s the reason why NFT technology can be applied by artists or game developers to tokenize their products.
We already know that the potential of NFT is very promising. But before, we only see them in artwork like pictures, images, videos, tweets,… The core value of these kinds of NFT is the story behind it or the collectable ability. Gaming makes another value for NFT: Applicable. This value increases the accessibility for NFT, then opens the potential market to become mainstream.
On the other hand, true ownership means the owner of NFT doesn’t need to depend on any other party to control their items.
In traditional online gaming, the power belongs to the game developer and game publisher. The supply, the feature, and also the value of the items are controlled by them, not by gamers. What if the game publisher decides to shut down the game? All the efforts of gamers will become meaningless. With NFT, no one can take away the items from gamers, even the server was shut down. Tokenize items help gamers can own and trade them with anyone in the world without limit as before.
The potential market for Play To Earn
According to the 2020 Global Games Market Report of Newzoo, the market are increasing steadily over the years. If there are any surprises, the market can reach $ 200 billion with 3 billion players in 2023. In this report, the in-game revenue will take 77% of total game revenues.
If we see the total market cap and fully-diluted cap in the chart below, we can have the conclusion that the market for blockchain gaming is still small when comparing with the overall gaming market. If the developer and the community can find the right way for blockchain gaming in general and Play To Earn gaming in particular, we can expect it can be something beyond a game, something that can be the real deal with people around the world.
In the next part, we will discover the difficulties for Play To Earn and the future for it.
Comments