Topic: That is why play to earn concept is a massive failure (Read 469 times)

The last post above was some time ago now, has the situation changed in the two and a half years or so since then?

The culture in this section of this forum seems quite startup / Venture Capital culture flavoured, for example I get the impression that many who posted in this thread and many many other threads hereabouts seem likely to have been thinking of two and a half years as long long time.

The more years you have lived, the smaller a fraction each next year is of how many years you have already gone through, so maybe as the years pass a mere two and a half years will seem a shorter and shorter span to you.

The fact is play to earn gaming has been going on since long before crypto, and probably, though likely at lower volumes of transactions, even before TCP/IP (aka "the internet") came along.

If you compare how it is faring today to how it was doing back in the dialup BBS days, or even to how it was doing back before the invention of BiTCoin, it seems to me it is still growing. Still making progress.

Any time money gets involved in anything, scams seem to follow. That seems pretty much natural and assume-able really.

A lot of what got me started into the idea of earning by playing was the thought that if players had "skin in the game" - something to lose if they misbehaved - maybe "griefing" would be easier to suppress.

So I thought about the idea of having players make a deposit, and of course also figured that like often or ideally happens with deposits, when the player leaves and, in the case they hadn't misbehaved, gets their deposit back they'd get back more than they put in, simply due to the trust account the deposits had been stored in in the meantime was an interest-bearing account.

Of course when I started to encounter ads for so called High Yield Income Programs (HYIPs) such things seemed at first glance, if actually able to work as advertised, to be potentially a great boon to a "deposit behavior-warranting collateral up front and get back more on exit" concept.

By now it is likely no surprise to you to learn that HYIPs did not turn out to work as advertised.

I can understand how Venture Capital folk and the like aren't drawn to the idea of using interest or earnings on accumulated wealth to provide earnings to players of games; afterall if you have the wealth earning, why part with any of the earnings, especially by giving it to players of some game that probably seems itself like just a bunch of unnecessary "overhead" shoehorned in-between your cash cow (earnings source, interest-bearing deposit or business profit-centre or whatever) and the output of your own earnings to you.

I would think they also take a view that if what they are doing for earnings is itself an investment, potentially "like any other" but hoped to be both high gain and long term reliable, surely other investors would short-circuit the scheme, investing directly into the the same things the game is investing into, rather than investing in the game or the playing of the game.

But in real life there are businesses that are exactly what such a game would be: a middleparty shoehorning in between an investment or portfolio of investments and the end-user beneficiaries... Think along the lines of Hedge Funds and suchlike.

So there is precedent for a business model that positions itself between a portfolio of investments and a population of end-user beneficiaries.

Not only do such models exist, if you look into it you will doubtless discover that profiting from their end-users is not only not how they work but, rather, doing so is frowned-upon in that field!

That is the kind of thinking that led me more and more onward from the conundrums of the internal economies of games to the conundrums of outside the game economies of paying for hosting, bandwidth, support, maintenance and maybe, dare one hope, eventually even development...

State of the (meta)game so far can be glimpsed starting from the site https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

it has become a risk if you enter the game from Play To Earn, a lot of this Gamefi project has been victimized because of a scammer,
yes one of the Play To Earn projects that was hype was Binamars,

the price of Binamars at the beginning of launching was at a price of $ 0.4 and now only at a price of $0.005,
of course this is very detrimental to investors and buyers of the characters in the game, very unfortunate,
hopefully the Play To Earn Project can make our trust rise again

Some games play to earn minting their tokens for rewards that will be distributed to players as their rewards in the game. but this is very unhealthy in the development of the game economy itself, where the cashflow economic cycle does not increase. although many games that carry play to earn have 2 tokens, usually 1 governance token and 1 reward token, in a game no matter how good the game is if the economy is unstable it will drop the price of the two tokens, and result in reduced player income, so many old players quit play and sell his NFT. if earnings have decreased, the hype of the game will decrease, causing few new players to register and play. Developers should think about the economic cycle carefully, and not rely on minting new tokens for rewards, as it will lead to inflation.

At some point they will achieve it. Still there is high risk, cuz of the scams you mentioned. Mixing game experience and p2e model depends not only on developers, but on the community too.

In time, 99% of current p2e games wont even be released. As they are another scam-begging scheme. "We have drawn a game art, it will be a NFT role play game, give us money for development". Gaming industry is full of this shit. While crypto p2e games try to raise money, individualist create rogue-like or pixel games in 3-6 months and earn from sales in steam. Crypto games will never achieve that.

The real question is whether bringing true gaming experience and a working play 2 earn model can actually co-exist within the same game. this is the challenge of the whole gamefi space and we are yet to find out

Unfortunately right now the earning part is the only part. The developers are promoting the part where the player could earn some money, and they do not develop the part where it is actually having fun while gaming.

I have talked about this before, the only game that can sustain would be the game where players are willing to pay to play, there are literally thousands of games that people pay to play, that is how gaming sector is standing afloat, all those in-app purchases and microstransactions are keeping the gaming world alive. Which is a proof that NFT's do have a place, but it needs to be games that people are willing to spend money on.

in time, a lot of p2e platforms will surpass what axie has achieved. the team behind it should continuously innovate to stay relevant with their chosen industry. if they fail to post updates and new features, some of these players will indeed go to newer p2e games. because these gamers won't stick to one game only, and if they see free access, definitely they will try that game. since there are a lot of gamers, every p2e game has their chance to get their audience, but it is their innovation how they will survive in the competition. this is why maybe axie is slowing down. because these gamers are finding a different option, cheaper than buying their AXS to get started.

I like the idea of scholarship programs. Who would have thought that it was possible in a game? It allows us to test the game without risking real money but what is good is that we can earn tokens with real world value that we can withdraw after reaching a certain limit. Axie must be the first that introduce this feature and other games follow it eventually.

It's only sad that axie is now slowly going down while other games that copy its features are now slowly rising up. The only thing that I can agree with the op is the learning curve of the game as I too noticed that most of the nft/metaverse game are hard to understand. It makes me don't want to try them but I look for the easier games.

I largely agree with you. The vast majority of games on the market do not have fair systems. Instead of play2earn, there are pay2earn games. It is necessary to allocate both big money and big time to these games. That's why I agree that some games are not fair, but the balance of supply and demand always has the final word. These games will continue to exist as long as users want.

We can't blame some investors who are now afraid to take the risks because honestly, some developers mishandled the NFT games which lead to its failure. However, if developers of new NFT projects would handle their games well as well as the supply of the NFT coins, I'm sure that more successful NFTs would attract lots of investors again.

Exactly! But they will for sure! Since it's still early the concept is still very basic talking for gameplay, but it will scale into way more complex and high quality projects. I'm paying close attention to some projects and the effort, funds and time they're investing is starting to bring some insane sneak peeks. Of course, even if they bring true gaming experience remains the other aspect.. the game economy.. 

Couldn't agree more. We are yet to see if play to earn can be integrated into games that focus on true gaming experience.

Just because the current games do not look good and do not create any hype for the game itself does not mean that we will not have any type of future game with great NFT's.

Simply put, imagine a world where skins in games like fortnight or counter strike were to be NFT's and not the way it is, imagine if it had limited NFT skins where the player who owns it could sell it and the company will make 10% from each sale? That would bring in so much money for the company as well.

Instead of tens of thousands of same skin sold by the company, it will be 10k skin sold by the company and then keep on making money forever from people selling to each other, even if people stop buying it for 9.99, they could still sell it for 1-2 dollars and keep you making money in that case.

I cannot agree at all with this statement, cause a lot of multi companies started to track and invest in blockchain gaming, i'm myself very pleased with situation cause unreal engines and engn token working very well if you ask me, i'm not feeling like i choose bad investment.

that's why I don't play P2E games when there are a lot of players, I mean when the number of players increases, the rewards will decrease and there will be many people selling tokens from the prizes they get.
For example, the PVU game, at the beginning of the project, the PVU token seemed to be going up, but now the price is going down because many are selling the token.

all companies of course think of that. The financials obtained from the game players will also help for the development of the game in the future.
I'm sure most people agree and like this. but some people don't like it because it will grow consumptive nature for game players.

I guess that is what differentiates the type of players, some playing a game for fun while the others are maximising revenue or profit. The only sustainable P2E cryptocurrenices/NFT games are the ones that are able to keep the money flowing. As long the players get a profit, the games will go on and users will keep coming.

Which I also believe as on the title of what OP said, the underlying concept of P2E is fragile, there is no other reason for a player to keep playing other than money, not the game aspect itself.

What exactly are you talking about? Like the games based on crypto earnings or just the normal streamers game where they stream, play and get paid from tips? Moreover games are always unique as long as they from the different genres. Yes obviously speed racing games from two different companies might feel same because they have the cars and roads. Lolz

If you looking for next level hit games then try our Nft in the crypto world. You may get something different here and win some Nft along the way just for having the fun mate.

This is actually pretty interesting. The people on iOS or play store searching for games are doing it for the fun of it. This is why they don't care whether the early adopters profited from it or not.

In these P2E games, the whole thing is so skewed towards the early adopters that nobody want to have to pay thousands of dollars to play a game that thousands of others have paid pennies, and sometimes zero money for. This "comparison" automatically leads everyone to try and find their own "first free game" rather than engage with an existing one.

While a few of these games will be able to sustain new players through good game mechanics and graphics, most crypto gamers are really just looking for their next flip or the one moonshot. The "jealousy" factor is pretty high and it is unclear as to how this plays out for new players trying to sign up to such games.