A wave of businesspeople has been persuaded by the meteoric success of Axie Infinity and StepN that web3 gaming, in which players own in-game assets through blockchain adoption rather than a centralized platform, is the future.
Some of the most popular games in the sector to date reward players with tokens that can be redeemed using a system called “play-to-earn.” P2E games have drawn millions of players and billions of cash from investors, but seasoned pros in the gaming business contend that they are inherently unsustainable.
They claim that rather than skilled programmers creating time-honored works, these games are the creation of financial engineers looking to become rich quickly.
The tremendous ascent and descent of Axie Infinity are telling. The game’s monthly sales volume fell to $4.5 million in July from a peak of $754 million in November, when bitcoin reached an all-time high.
According to Maciej Burno, who is leading Reality’s new metaverse division, “Most GameFi creators are not game developers.”
Burno is one of several seasoned gamers who believe in blockchain and are working to make blockchain games more popular. Their goal is to dispel the myth that web3 games, made famous by P2E, are all shady and vulgar. Instead, they aim to create games that are entertaining and long-lasting while also introducing cryptocurrency as a cutting-edge method to reward both creators and players.
Users in Axie Infinity purchase and breed adorable blob-like animals known as Axis using non-fungible tokens that are verified by the blockchain. Sales of the NFTs then pay awards for players who accumulate tokens through gameplay, and the tokens, the game’s native cryptocurrency, may then be withdrawn.
This implies that in order for the game to be financially viable, there must be a steady infusion of new players. Because of this, detractors liken P2E games to pyramid schemes.
Toong contends that many P2E games aren’t actually games in the traditional sense. They more closely resemble gamified decentralized finance (DeFi) products. Axie Infinity is dismissed as “basic” or even “boring” by die-hard gamers, who have long been against free-to-play, mindless mobile games.
However, the chance to earn several hundred dollars each month simply clicking on a computer screen might be alluring for people who reside in impoverished nations. That’s a big reason why Axie Infinity became popular during the epidemic, when many people lost their jobs, in nations like the Philippines. The game is more like labor to them than it is enjoyable.
Simon Davis, CEO of Mighty Bear Games, a Singapore-based web3 game firm that just raised $10 million in a token sale, said of the criticism of Axie Infinity, “I think there is a little of snobbery in it.”
Former Ubisoft design manager Davis says, “I don’t like the term play to earn. Since the main goal of playing a game is to have fun, I don’t think that should be the main driving force. However, a player might later decide they no longer wish to participate in the game and receive some of their initial investment returned.
