My take on the P2E (play to earn) blockchain cryptocurrency based game genre.
There is a small minority of P2E games that are legitimately well designed, developed and implemented. Which could succeed as standalone games without blockchain or crypto support. They compliment their existing platform by offering support for open item marketplaces, NFTs, airdrops, and inhouse crypto tokens. Which when done properly can add tremendous value.
The overwhelming majority of P2E games however are blatant cash grabs. Copypasta, autogaming, generic clones of existing games with a small twist to gameplay and different art.
Some of the P2E games with upfront costs (to initially offset player earnings) are legit.
With P2E and blockchain games, what seems to matter most is finding walkthroughs and examples of gameplay on youtube, before spending a dime.
Topic: On Crypto Game Business Models (Read 70 times)
After a lot of experimentation and testing I have come to a lot of the same conclusions that others have regarding the crypto gaming industry. For the sake of keeping this as short as possible, there are a few points that I want to address as a developer and I’m hoping to get some feedback here because we all want a healthy market for this stuff.
1) Requiring a user to buy anything upfront or at all is the devil.
2) People would rather just play the damn game and if the crypto is cool or earnable, great.
3) Keep-it-simple, I’m a programmer and I get a headache reading some of this stuff. It also just comes off as a scam because it is confusing.
So we know that networked games cost. In my experience, you’ll be paying at least $120/mo in hosting if you roll out your own chain and it’s a (very) small mmo. This figure is based on my own experience developing these types of projects. And for some of you that is cheap but for say, an indie developer, looking to check out this space it’s not really because that fluctuates (typically upward over time).
Now then we need to talk about fundraising. You really can’t, unless you do an ICO (assuming you have your own coin/token) or similar which brings us back to the nuances of #1. Somebody has to pay for these games and mainstream gamers absolutely will not (and largely kind of hate crypto anything) but if you’re lucky they’ll check it out.
This leaves crypto enthusiasts to foot the bill but that actually works because once they buy into any crowdfunding-oriented pre-sale they now have a game currency ready to use and flex on all those gamers. And probably some profit by the time it comes out. Or they can just use it all in the game. I think that’s cool!
Except if you have your own token it’s considered centralized and now the crypto people kind of hate you too. But they might make some…money? It’s toxic and that’s a bad sentiment for the nascent crypto games business.
In conclusion some developers (including myself) have watered down just how crypto the crypto game is. And nuked our own custom projects to support things like BTC in-game instead. Since it just “looked better” while incurring the same costs with less of the upside. In this case the dev would not have a supply of their own cryptocurrency to reward anyone or fund the game, and instead need to take fees from micro-transactions which nobody really likes in any context.
I’m typing this up because a lot of crypto game developers, including myself, are worried that we are already losing runway and success now seems to be based purely on hype and not solving real problems like these. These hype cycles only attract retail investors who don’t care about these problems. And trying to solve them means running into all these existing issues with no support. Or so it seems. And so I’m here to get some thoughts on this and hear about what your favorite crypto game is and why.
1) Requiring a user to buy anything upfront or at all is the devil.
2) People would rather just play the damn game and if the crypto is cool or earnable, great.
3) Keep-it-simple, I’m a programmer and I get a headache reading some of this stuff. It also just comes off as a scam because it is confusing.
So we know that networked games cost. In my experience, you’ll be paying at least $120/mo in hosting if you roll out your own chain and it’s a (very) small mmo. This figure is based on my own experience developing these types of projects. And for some of you that is cheap but for say, an indie developer, looking to check out this space it’s not really because that fluctuates (typically upward over time).
Now then we need to talk about fundraising. You really can’t, unless you do an ICO (assuming you have your own coin/token) or similar which brings us back to the nuances of #1. Somebody has to pay for these games and mainstream gamers absolutely will not (and largely kind of hate crypto anything) but if you’re lucky they’ll check it out.
This leaves crypto enthusiasts to foot the bill but that actually works because once they buy into any crowdfunding-oriented pre-sale they now have a game currency ready to use and flex on all those gamers. And probably some profit by the time it comes out. Or they can just use it all in the game. I think that’s cool!
Except if you have your own token it’s considered centralized and now the crypto people kind of hate you too. But they might make some…money? It’s toxic and that’s a bad sentiment for the nascent crypto games business.
In conclusion some developers (including myself) have watered down just how crypto the crypto game is. And nuked our own custom projects to support things like BTC in-game instead. Since it just “looked better” while incurring the same costs with less of the upside. In this case the dev would not have a supply of their own cryptocurrency to reward anyone or fund the game, and instead need to take fees from micro-transactions which nobody really likes in any context.
I’m typing this up because a lot of crypto game developers, including myself, are worried that we are already losing runway and success now seems to be based purely on hype and not solving real problems like these. These hype cycles only attract retail investors who don’t care about these problems. And trying to solve them means running into all these existing issues with no support. Or so it seems. And so I’m here to get some thoughts on this and hear about what your favorite crypto game is and why.
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