Topic: That is why play to earn concept is a massive failure (Read 493 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.

People always played to earn money. That is why gambling so popular. People spend a lot of time playing in casino.
Now appear Casino metaverses which give people more opportuntities and allow to earn even more money like this https://twitter.com/PokerFacesNft/status/1505530774690353160

Maybe you are right for those games that are simple and has same concept with some rugged projects that pretend to do p2e. There are lots of projects now doing p2e and cant say that they are good. But if you are gonna enter a p2e one then pick the highest rating with some good background or superb developers.

But not all projects like that, there are also some projects the entry fee is quite cheap so it all depends on the team that manages the project, and currently there are very many games present and they all have different missions, the lack of enthusiasts at this time maybe they only focus on games that can give them a big advantage and currently the market situation is not good so we must be able to adapt to the current atmosphere.

Some devs had already figured out what the next hype will be after they saw Ukraine ask for donations for NTFs. This is where the next crowdfunding will be in the coming years or the government will release thier digital currency in exchange for NFTs and then after that, this hype will die and they will once again figure out something else.

All hype is going to die. I haven't even registered to one play to earn a game but its already dying.

Exactly.

They are essentially thinly veiled ponzi schemes that have no real product and riding on the hype that has been generated over the past year or so under the umbrella term "P2E".

Definitely don't think that the bulk of them are going to be sustainable for the long run. I think that it is a matter of time before the capital inflows stop, and the ecosystem mostly collapses under its own weight.

The companies of those games are already making huge amounts of money, I do not know if they really need to spend insane amount of time to put NFT into those games as well. I do not mean that you can't, it could be done but it would be hard for developers to combine those games with NFT's and not like that would bring in super amount of extra money to them neither.

Look at how much GTA already made, and that game has been out for like 100 years already and it is still getting bought. This means that companies do not really need something huge to add into those games, they are profiting form it already and need no additional support for it.

It is really unfortunate how it was be going to happen but the hype will certainly be fading in the coming time. That is why it was too risky to invest in this type of project as surely those who come late will not going to earn big anymore. Even to compare with the Axie Infinity, those early gamers had made a huge profit as the price of the token they get is high which is very unlikely in today's situation.

However, the play-to-earn gaming platform today is quite growing. Many gaming sites had joined that I thought even the hype is fading, they can still make a profit from here.

Before you say that, have you check the games that you see on the store right now? Now tell me, what can you see? most of these games do also have similarity but the only slight difference is the name. You shouldn't wonder if the same thing can happen in the nft and metaverse gaming but not all games are high cost and cost in the price isn't only the basis for the players to ignore the game. Have you seen axie? During its peak where the cost of creating a team is too expensive, this doesn't stop players to continue on the game.

It's not only the early comers that can make money but late adopters can earn too but some won't care about how much will they earn but as long as they love the game and it makes them enjoy. Nft and metaverse gaming is still a thing so their hype is not yet fading.

This should not be surprising at all, we all know there are people that can make a living out of playing video games due to their skills or their charisma by publishing videos on YouTube, however the aim of the games themselves is just to give a fun experience.

However in games which are play to earn the whole core concept of the game is not dedicated to have fun but to somehow profit from the game itself, this means there are almost no players just paying for the fun of it, which reduces the audience which could be interested in the game and eventually leads to its demise.

The hype will not be always there, this is a big challenge for every developer to stay active in the market. I’ve seen a lot of fake project with a poor developer but still, there are good P2E project that is still here despite of the decreasing number of users and investors. There’s a lot of failed project and that is beyond our control, only good project will stay and they will surely rise again.

I actually have to agree with a lot of points that you are bringing up OP. In the end all of the play2earn games that are existing at the moment are not played because they just a fun game to play so people are enjoying to play it. The fact that you can make money while playing a game should always be just a positive side effect and not the main selling point of the game and sadly this is still the case with all of the existing play2earn games that i know of that are existing out there already, they are just not fun. Then of course we have the same effects as with every other hype in the crypto space, which means we have hundreds of play2earn games now because they hopped on the hype train of Axies Infinity and only a few of them will survive.

There's truth about early adopters but it's part of the risk that those people have taken and if the game booms, they're on it and the risk is worth it.

About the new users and fees, it's not always the case. There has been games that are free for everyone to test them out and it's your free will to decide whether you want to go further or just stop there.

It's okay because that's the same with the market, when the bull is there, everyone gets an eye and interested.

It depends on the game itself as well, but mostly it is just destined to fail anyway. It is like those P2W MMOs out there and of course those ain't NFTs or Metaverse. Probably those in the top are going to remain playing the game, but when the hype dies out, they will surely just follow also. Dead game in the end.

I respect your opinion but don't really agree. It comes down to the team, yes, a lot of the P2E games we see are just cash grabs and want your money before playing them but if you look hard enough, you'll find some really good projects. NFTshootout is a great example, they have a scholarship system where beginners can play for free and the learn the game. The scholar's get rewarded daily with $SHOO tokens, they can cash these out or invest them into in-game items that earn you really good passive income. If you find a team that are constantly building and being transparent with their community, you're onto a winner!

It is clear that the number of items growing makes it lower valued as well, and that is something that cannot really be fixed just yet. What I mean is that if you are playing axie infinity, you know that axies used to worth a lot because there were not many of them, and with the few of it, people made all the money, but since they bred more and more and more, the number of axies grew, so that same money was made by a lot more people, and that was their problem. Same logic applies to every single play to earn game as well.

If only a few hundred, or even few thousand people make the money, then it will worth a lot, but if tens of thousands of people start making the same profit, then it will eventually drop.

     Honestly, the gaming industry related to crypto currency nowadays are crap and needs to mature. It has amazing potential but if it stays the way it is, it will surely self destruct. But nope, I highly doubt that the gaming industry in the crypto space will stay the same. So let us all be just patient for now and observe as the ging industry in the crypto space matures. By mature, I mean crypto games being actually fun and not just attracting traffic with profits. When this happens, the multi billion dollar gaming industry outside of crypto will surely come rushing in. You just imaging how bug this industry would be by then.

they just want to earn money not develop crypto which is a good idea and good for humanity. sometimes the crypto world is always used by irresponsible people to pollute the crypto environment. keep careful in researching the project. don't get caught in a scam??

Is the decrease in hype of a certain thing in crypto the basis now that it is already a massive failure?
ICO's back in 2017-2018 are at its hype. It decreased until it faded out but there are few projects that survived and until now it is developing. Same thing in DeFi's. There is also a hype in DeFi's as well and many projects failed while there are some who survived and are doing well until now.

Same with NFT games. There will be some games that will not successful while there are some who will stay in crypto and will be successful. I don't want to say which games is since its hard to predict but I believe there will be some P2E games that will be successful though I'm agreeing with what you said that early adopters are making a lot of money because that is also the case in other projects even its P2E or not. That is the advantage of being an early adopter because you took the risk in investing into it when its still a new project.

Games like Call of Duty or GTA if they happens to be backed by their own tokens or step into the metaverse world, they will have more players playing and earning because of the nature of the games, the developers are highly experience, creative and always make every version of the games more interesting than the previous version. These are HD games with addictive game play and can't be compare to most of these p2e games that where hurriedly developed, they are free to play with the exception of in-game item purchase.
P2e on the other hand are not f2p, players are required to make some investment in other to qualify to play, the op is not far from the truth, most of the p2e game play are boring and complicated, the earnings no longer profitable for new users.  The only way p2e will have more recognition is when most of the big game companies decided to back their games with a native token for gamers to earn.

Good point but there is still a huge difference. The games you play are already well developed and likely to last longer since a reputable company is behind it. Many P2E games that launched are disappointing or less than what they presented it to be. Graphics are just aweful and let's not talk about bugs.

It really depends on the team.. How they execute the project and what is their initial goal. Most game projects use similar tokenomics, but the results can be different based on the team's decisions and adequate acting and support.
The idea of play to earn content is roaming the internet for a long time. It's live officially with blockchain gaming, but it's still early model which has a huge room for improvement.
I'm noticing improvement in the quality of the games that are been released. Before it was click to earn most of the time. Now projects are focusing not only on the earning aspect, but on gaming too.
I agree that many games have high entry fee, but not all. It's like you're buying monthly subscription for WoW, but in this case you have a chance to return your investment, even profit.
And definitely there are some very good looking games that are either live or about to be released, mixing both earning and OG gaming. 

The issue with dumping should be avoidable if the right incentives are set. Of course, I am no tokenomics expert, but I can already see a few projects trying to do things differently and mitigate this.

Here's the thing about play to earn games. Many players will play it and a new coin will be mined which where they can sell it too for a profit that's why it was called play to earn but imagine a large number of players that's playing this game and the amount of the token they are generating and the use of this coin is very limited and can only be used in their game and website. That's why it crashes the supply of the tokens that being generated is way more higher than the demand since the coin was not that useful at all.

The bottom line is that game projects are businesses that are really meant for gamers who pay
their developers with stuff in the game to upgrade to whatever they need.
However, the Play to Earn concept is against that, making developers have to spend a lot of thought
and funds because they have to develop while providing income for their players. Even though it has been done now but they can't last for long.

Whenever I'm playing COD cold war on my console I always earn 100CP once every two weeks, this can be used for in game purchases but if this CP is a real token everyone will call it a scam just like a few comments on here, maybe play to earn games should have never happened in the first place or it's people that can never be satisfied.

The developers didn't care about pooled reward system. They are only care for their users to grinding more and more tokens to be dumped to the market. I would not be surprised to see if majority of these tokens have been going to the hell. So many play to earn projects have very big inflation on its tokenomic. this is also driving the price to go down and the late joiners who have been paying to be able to play to game lose a lot. This system is not sustain for long term and so many things need to be adjusted. People are calling it as ponzi but i do agree with it until we didn't need pennies to play to game and i will stop call it as a ponzi.

There are many interesting games that are built on simply playing and using this to receive bonuses. Then create your character and use attachments to improve its quality. Now there are many different games offered, as they say for every taste and there are plenty to choose from.

The p2e concept might be overhyped but it is too early to call it a failure as the field is still so early stage. Also, p2e is not the main value proposition of blockchain games, digital asset ownership is.

This is true and probably the main reason why NFT games started to become weak including solid play to earn games because investors is losing confidence on the P2E system. There's always a major flaw on this kind of payment structure in long term since the funds being distributed to all the players came from the treasury and the liquidity pool supporting it is just came from the new players money and not from the income of the team from outside game profit such as advertisement and promotion by other brand. Imagine a game that consistently distributing funds to all players while the team is just relying on the new comers to provide liquidity in the economy of the game. The game will obviously die when there's no new players enter and interested to invest in the game.

To be honest you can find so many design but i rarely see the foundation that was creating their own game. Hmmmm... i don't even think people can still seeing this as an opportunity.


I would like to call this as pay to earn rather than play to earn.
Pretty much the same like ponzi. Axie infinity already proven it even the developers creating more and more tokens. The new account that registered probably owned by the same guy that already played the game.

They are all ponzi schemes. They can only last as long as they can attract new players and sooner or later they always run out of suckers to scam. If you get in early you can make a lot of money but sometimes the scheme collapses way too early and the early adopters gets the d too. Ignoring them is the safest option.

They are all literally the same. You are right, just with different design but the same concept (except for few). Honestly, most people are not here for the game. They are here for the money. Like you said, early adopters if lucky are able to make some quick profit from it. Rest will have to invest a lot to make some profit which isn't guaranteed. Playing for free gives you almost peanuts. But I have read articles online where they say that those play to earn games have helped them during the pandemic to make some money. I guess at least those money is worth something in underdeveloped countries.

All the hype will only be profitable for early investor it cannot be denied, so when you know something is a little late better do not get into it, but it cannot be denied also in the hype there will still be new projects that can long lasting and provide profit to investors only the indicators are difficult to guess so it is more to speculation.

I think anything that only depends on referrals is the same as a lie and the irony is that there are currently many like that,
it is a good thing with NFT games because we can make money playing games and without having to depend on referrals,
hope that in the future there will be new innovations

It's not just the quality of the graphics or the price of the NFT that is reliable, the foundation of a strong game is the large number of communities and abundant players. A common selling strategy used by the P2E industry is whitelisting which limits the growth of their own ecosystem. This only gives new established players a chance (from other games). Many developers are not aware that they're not the only ones trying to develop in this industry and these players aren't aiming to stay, but always moving to more profitable places.

I'm not saying that the Play To earn concept is a flop but they haven't designed it perfectly.
There are many shortcomings that I encountered from this P2E concept.
Like, games are usually shown to get fun when playing but we are required to earn with certain missions.
In addition, if it is combined with cryptocurrencies that depend on the law of supply and demand, I think it is not very suitable.
If we play the game and we get tokens from it, the scarcity of the tokens will continue to grow so that the demand goes down and in the end only those who are the first get the profit.

Is it decreasing? Do you have the proof to back it up? Because most of the time I am in discord joined in different NFT games with play-to-earn features, and I can see people piling up and there are even request to join the channel but it is full.
Can you be more specific about what play-to-earn games you are supporting?
Sure, early adopters are the ones who will make the most out of it but that is because they have the courage to risk their first investment, unlike others who will just follow when there is an assurance from the risk-takers (early adopters) to join in.
Now imagine if no one took the first risk?

oh wait where is the failure?
just because the hype faded and the number of new players dwindled, you concluded that the game was a flop?
isn't it too shallow to think like that?
a real example look at axie, although there are many games that look the same and slowly their hype has faded, but they are still holding on. and it's not a failure, I call it consistency. as long as the ecosystem is good, games that you think are all the same still have hope to thrive and survive. So don't think it's all a failure.

Oh well that is what we call hype in the market, so it's about timing, even bitcoin. So it's more of investors getting early, so you have a lot of advantage and that's what separate men for the boys. Wise investors knows when to get in, while majority just get onboard when the hype is very high and when the price is about to reach all time high which is not good. if the hype is fading then so be it, for sure there will be another one that will replace this play to earn concept.

This means that the game contains referrals, because what I understand is that such a game model will only benefit those who are the first to register, but currently there are many forms of independent games, not depending on referrals that people share, maybe you can check out NFT games or other games, depending on how you like the game you want, because the availability of games is currently quite a lot and a variety of characters

what is to be expected from all of that, isn't it from the start that games like that were made just for the sake of profit. so there are no long term plans to keep the game popular. when the hype fades, the early investors will start to leave it and there will be no new users wanting to play because the game already looks unprofitable.

all crypto games look the same. and what's even more bullshit is that they always use the "metaverse" to look innovative. even though their game looks boring. if from the start they wanted to focus on making good games, without the metaverse frills, there should be lots of concepts/genres they could choose from and develop.

You can look at it from a different perspective. I think now is the time for low quality p2e games to be seeded out and leave space for the games that bring value to gamers, not investors

We shouldn't be surprised by that without actual use of the token and the increasing number of games and competitive in the industry it is not surprising to see a decline of users and players from these games but in my opinion I see them more useful than the NFT where all you have is an image and nothing you can do about it but I think if some games out there managed to have a good partnership with other project and make their tokens useful as possible I'm sure that there will be no decrease in players.

ya.ya.yo!

Not really, it depends on the developers themselves, games only gets boring when it lacks the fun or better updates from time to time for example call of duty multiplayer devs makes millions if not billions already from this game because they are able to keep the fun alive for gamers, I know it's not backed by any token but it's a good one to make an example out of.

All of the games are built on the same foundation, with the exception of skin colour and weapon design. High game entry fees and a high learning curve for new users are discouraging new users from joining the system. Because of the unique teams they have, only early adopters are making a lot of money. The number of unique users registering each day is decreasing, indicating that the hype is fading.