Play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving thousands of video game enthusiasts in low-income countries like the Philippines a chance to earn a living.
The rise of P2E was a godsend for many, because the gross domestic product in the Philippines is decreased by 9.6% in 2020, the largest drop in more than 70 years, according to a survey by IHS Markit. With so many Filipinos out of work, thousands flocked to P2E games. The Axie Infinity team reported in March 2020 that: over 29,000 new players from the Philippines signed up for the game, out of 70,000 new signups worldwide in the same month.
Those players signed up because Axie Infinity and other P2E games offer them a chance to earn a viable income simply by playing and completing achievements. In addition, Axie’s community resolved the requirement that players must purchase an NFT before they can start playing by offering scholarships to new players in exchange for a portion of their income.
The rapid growth of P2E in low-income countries is well documented, but the real breakthrough for the industry will come when it succeeds in tapping into the traditional community of video game players that are not primarily motivated by revenue. That means we’re targeting the 66% of gamers who mostly play games according to Statista to relax and decompress†
Unlike NFT-based games, traditional video games offer a much broader genre of titles, with ultra-realistic graphics and rich storylines. Immersive sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto provide gamers with a way to completely escape reality and become completely immersed in a new world, where they can put their own everyday life on hold to become the hero in a captivating story. The biggest P2E games don’t do this – to put it bluntly, the gameplay in Axie Infinity is about as boring as it gets, and until the industry does something about this, conventional gamers who play for fun probably won’t get involved. working on it.
Top notch P2E games are on the way
The winning combination is to have both P2E elements, a low barrier to entry and an exciting and enjoyable gameplay experience. Fortunately, developers of some of the most promising upcoming P2E titles seem to be aware of this.
Take Combat Drones, a game soon to be released on the Solana blockchain, a 3D isometric shooter that shares similarities with classic titles such as Call of Duty and Fortnite. Video game purists will be happy to hear that the developers of Battle Drones built the game using Unreal Engine, a popular and widely used game engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal Engine allows developers to create huge virtual worlds with incredibly rich graphics and fluid motion, which means a completely different level of realism than is possible with current P2E games.
With Battle Drones, the developers plan to launch with a player-vs-environment mode called Onslaught, where players can win rewards such as BATTLE tokens and drone parts. There will also be a community leaderboard so players can chart their progress and fight for recognition among their peers. In the future, Battle Drones will add additional game modes such as Co-op, multiplayer, tower defense and even a drone racing mode to enhance the experience for players.
Players can customize their drone NFTs with various parts that they can purchase from the Drones Bones Store or win by beating their opponents and taking on challenges. The team also has ambitions to launch regular player-versus-player battle royale matches, where numerous players come together and battle it out.
A second promising title that aims to turn the P2E dynamics on its head is Plutoniansan upcoming MMORPG Metaverse space strategy game with elements of strategic RPG, shooter action, multiplayer PvE and social alternative reality games.
Built using a combination of Unreal Engine 5 and WebXR, Plutonians will take place in a massive metaverse accessible across multiple screens, including augmented reality, virtual reality, web, and mobile.
It will be a space trading adventure game in the form of the classic Elite game, in which players have the freedom to become a space pirate and spend their time looting other ships they encounter. Alternatively, they can take a more diplomatic approach, trading with others at the nearest spaceport canteen. Players must search for items, including increasingly elaborate and powerful starships, weapons and technology, as they travel across the vast Plutonians universe to explore new worlds and opportunities.
What does this mean for guilds?
New titles like Battle Drones and Plutonians promise to open up the world of P2E games to a much wider audience of gamers who only care about gameplay in the first place. The ability to earn a living will only become a bonus for gamers looking to escape the grind of their daily lives, but one powerful enough to become the norm, eventually incorporating P2E aspects into most new video game releases. release.
That makes it harder to predict which P2E games will have stamina, something that could have major implications for gaming guilds like Yield Guild Games, Crypto Gaming Guild, and Avocado Guild to name a few.
Guilds play a vital role in the P2E economy, giving players without the financial resources access to the NFTs they need to start playing. Yield Guild Games and its rivals have amassed huge collections of NFTs that they rent out to scientists in exchange for a portion of their income, but it’s a model with inherent risks: if a game loses popularity, those NFTs will quickly lose value, to at the expense of the guild that invested in it.
As P2E shifts its focus to gameplay and newer, more exciting games continue to come into the fray, we’re likely to see a shift in the guild’s strategies. a guild, Balthazar, already does this. Balthazar is a decentralized autonomous organization, similar to other guilds, but the business model is very different. Instead of buying NFTs, it rents tokens from individuals before lending them to its most promising “wizards”.
Balthazar sees itself as the “Airbnb” of P2E gaming guilds, CEO John Stefanidis recently told Stockhead. interview† “We want to remain as few assets as possible,” he said, explaining that it is impossible to predict which P2E games will continue to exist.
Balthazar has a second model in the works with Balthazar Buy, a soon-to-be-launched marketplace aimed at investors. Balthazar will recommend promising NFTs to investors to buy, and when they buy those tokens, it will rent them from investors and lend them to its wizards. It makes sense because Balthazar is well placed to identify the highest yielding NFTs, Stefanidis told Stockhead.
As the P2E game industry drives, it will only be a matter of time before the space is saturated with dozens of top games that are not only fun to play but also feature huge communities, at the level of Dota, Counterstrike and GTA . Perhaps even Battle Drones and Plutonians will enjoy the same level of recognition someday. Meanwhile, progressive guilds like Balthazar will be well positioned to take advantage of this, giving anyone who wants to get in on the action the chance to do just that.
Image: Pixabay