The gaming industry is growing rapidly and generating more revenue each year. It has become even more successful than TV, film, and music, thanks to its software, hardware, and intellectual property offerings.
The online gaming market is expected to reach $242 billion by 2027, up from $107 billion in 2020, according to research. The COVID-19 pandemic played a big role in this growth, as people stayed home longer and turned to casual and online gaming to socialize during lockdown.
Of the many rising trends in gaming, alongside VR originals to remakes of classic titles, play-to-earn (P2E) gaming is gaining popularity as a novelty form of video game that allows its players to earn money by gaming. The promise of financial gain and the many success stories from early-bird play-to-earn adopters make P2E an enticing new realm for many to explore. In this article, we’ll cover the following:
- What is Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games?
- Examples of Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games
- What Are the Benefits of P2E Games?
- The Future of P2E Games
What is Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games?
Play-to-earn games are video games that enable players to earn in-game rewards with real-world value.
Before play-to-earn games, the gaming industry was already familiar with the concept of monetizing its infrastructure. The rise of e-sports and professional gaming came with ludicrous wealth and fame for highly-skilled top players. On the other hand, less competitive gamers flocked to online viewership platforms like YouTube and Twitch, hoping to build a following and monetize their live streams. There are also unofficial marketplaces where players can purchase in-game items.
However, P2E games literally come as a game-changer. It uses blockchain technology to reward players with in-game collectibles in the form of characters, items, digital clothing, or “skins.” These digital items, often branded as non-fungible tokens, can be sold for real-world money at the player’s discretion.
With this arrangement, P2E games allow ownership of these valuable digital properties away from a company or government for the first time in gaming history. This way, gamers can potentially form new economies.
Examples of Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games
There are numerous P2E games built on the blockchain. Here, we will discuss five leading P2E games.
Axie Infinity
Axie Infinity is an online play-to-earn game created in 2018 by Vietnamese blockchain gaming studio Sky Mavis. Inspired by the Pokémon gaming franchise, the Axie Infinity game features cute and formidable monsters called Axies. Players use these Axies to engage in single-player or multi-player combat within the game.
A team of three Axies is needed to start playing in the gaming ecosystem. The developer team offers free starter Axies to newbies. There are also classic Axies purchased to unlock more features.
Sky Mavis built Axie Infinity on the Ethereum sidechain Ronin network. Being a sidechain allows the Ronin blockchain to benefit from Ethereum’s security while offering added features within the gaming ecosystem. This includes fast transactions and reduced transaction fees. The network also offers a native cryptocurrency dubbed the RON token to engage in governance processes.
The Axie ecosystem also features the AXS token for in-game purchases. In-game items are represented by NFTs. They include Axies and land plots. These assets are tradeable on the game’s marketplace for fiat currency.
Axie Infinity’s popularity came in 2021, following the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, gamers relied on online streams to feed their families. Popular in developing countries such as the Philippines, Venezuela, and Indonesia, the game promised players a more significant source of income than their local physical economy.
The Sandbox
The Sandbox is an Ethereum-based virtual world where players can own and customize digital lands. The project was originally launched as a 2D mobile game in 2011 by Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget. The platform is a subsidiary of the gaming project Animoca Brands. In 2018, Sandbox began incorporating blockchain services into its gaming ecosystem.
The Sandbox is described as a “game of games” platform because it hosts several gaming platforms. The ecosystem is divided into LANDs, a collection of 166,464 NFTs. LAND is a digital piece of real estate within the Sandbox metaverse. Players can create games, host contests, shows, concerts, virtual museums, and others on each digital land parcel.
Landowners can monetize their digital assets by renting or populating them with valuable content. Items within the gaming platform are purchased and denominated using the ERC-20 utility token SAND.
Wilderness P2E
Wilderness P2E is a virtual world of wizards, magic, and fantasy. It was created in December 2021 by engineering graduates Neha Singh and Ryan Pal as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The gaming project was financed by the Decentraland DAO fund.
Wilderness P2E bolsters a free-to-play gaming environment built on the Ethereum layer-2 network Polygon blockchain. Gamers within the ecosystem engage in an immersive player-versus-player Magic Combat experience using spells and other magical paraphernalia. They can also collect decentralized wearables and other wizard-themed NFTs.
After winning a fellow player or non-player character (NPC), players get rewarded with WLDY tokens. Gamers can use WLDY to purchase in-game collectibles. Other ways to earn in Wilderness P2E include completing daily tasks.
Gods Unchained
Gods Unchained is a free-to-play P2E competitive trading card game. The game was launched in 2019 by the blockchain game development company Immutable. The game utilizes the Ethereum blockchain to host its ecosystem.
Players in the game collect and trade cards featuring mythical creatures, spells, gods, and artifacts. Each card is represented as an NFT. To participate in Gods Unchained, gamers use trading cards to build decks of 30 cards and partake in strategic battles to outsmart their opponent gods, reducing their life points to zero.
Gods Unchained has a native token called GODS. With a fixed supply of 500 million, GODS tokens get issued to players as rewards for their engagement in the game by playing, trading, and partaking in daily play activities. GODS can also be staked in the game’s “Offering of the GODS” staking activity, allowing token holders to earn more GODS cryptocurrency.
Alien Worlds
Alien Worlds is a P2E game that offers a metaverse experience. The gaming ecosystem was created in late 2020 by Sarojini McKenna, the co-founder and CEO of Alien Worlds’ publisher, Dacoco. The play-to-earn game is multichain, as it operates on three blockchains – Ethereum, Binance Chain, and WAX.
Portrayed in a space exploration style, players within the Alien Worlds enter one out of six realms in the ecosystem and use their NFT-based rigs to mine for Trilium (TLM), the game’s native token. Each realm comes with its own unique mining difficulties, TLM rewards, and more. Gamers also compete in quests and battles for which they get rewarded with TLM tokens and other NFT items.
The game also offers decentralized finance services such as yield farming and staking. It also runs a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) where token holders can engage in voting processes that influences the game’s development.
What Are the Benefits of P2E Games?
Besides financial gain and passive income, many benefits of playing video games also apply to play-to-earn games. We previously mentioned the social benefits of online gaming during the lockdowns, allowing people to connect despite long periods of isolation while being able to entertain themselves through gaming. P2E games share this benefit by allowing players to compete and trade with each other for in-game items, as well as real-world currency.
Another benefit of video games is the impact they have on the player’s mental health. Forbes explains that aside from providing players with relaxation and a break from work- or home-related stress, video games can improve decision-making, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills. This is especially important in P2E games, as the stakes are higher and in-game assets contain real-world value.
Generally, strategy and higher skills are what set the top players of a play-to-earn game apart from the crowd, so taking the time to learn game mechanics and improve those aforementioned skills can go a long way for you both financially and mentally.
The Future of P2E Games
In a previous post, we discussed Axie Infinity’s milestone of reaching $4 billion in all-time high sales in NFTs. Such wins show how much the P2E gaming ecosystem is thriving despite the bearish trends surrounding the crypto and NFT markets. Major P2E game developers continue to build more features to boost development and ease player concerns.
A feature on transience in technology by LHH notes that much of the hype around cryptocurrency was sparked by investors who wanted to get a leading edge on the new technology. The future of P2E gaming lies in developers’ ability to use new technologies to ensure a safe and fun environment for players and their assets.
