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Play-to-earn games, sometimes known as P2E games, are quickly becoming one of the most popular categories of Metaverse games. P2E games, on the other hand, are just what they sound like: they are games in which players may earn cryptocurrencies and/or NFTs.
If you are still behind the times, this can be confusing to you. P2E games provide players the opportunity to have fun while also earning money, which gives the appearance of being an excellent concept on paper. However, the issue that has to be answered is: how long do these games last?
Three experts in the bitcoin market Cheng Guo, the creator and CEO of StepVR, Cora Chen, the head of China at Polygon, and U-Zyn Chua, the co-founder and CTO of Cake DeFi in Singapore, discussed the topic on a panel at Wild Digital SEA 2022, a technology conference put on by the Catcha Group. The conference was held in Singapore.
Focus Has Shifted From Having Fun to Earning Money
Since blockchain technology is still very new to the general public, issues regarding its stability and sustainability have been properly raised. This is mainly because of the fact that blockchain technology is still a relatively new concept not a lot of people have understood yet.
In particular, point-to-entry (P2E) games, which are not devoid of their very own debates, as U-Zyn from Cake DeFi demonstrated over the course of our chat, have not been spared from this in Metaverse-related games. According to U-Zyn, they notice a lot of users playing more for the purpose of making money farming than for pure enjoyment. More important than simply having pleasure is making money for one’s own benefit.
He went on to clarify that a good number of these games are funded by inflation; the more you play, the more tokens you make, and the more people you attract. On the other hand, he stated that mining was the major focus of blockchain technology back when it was originally being created.
According to U-Zyn, mining is essentially a game where the goal is to better oneself while simultaneously contributing to the improvement of the environment. When mining, which is done to ensure the integrity of the blockchain, is considered, the level of security is increased. On the other hand, he is not familiar with the concept of enrichment in relation to P2E games.
He believes that anyone who farms in a P2E game is doing damage to the community as well as the other players since they are taking something away from them. He went on to say that it’s a race, which is similar to a race to the bottom, and he wants play-to-earn games to discover a solution that would enable players to behave in a way that is beneficial to everyone in the ecosystem. This is similar to how an economy works in the real world.
Need for More Accessible P2E Games
Cheng Guo, who works at StepVR in China, believes that the fact that a P2E game is really playable is the single most important need for such a title. This transformation will only take place in the Metaverse because if we make a game right now, we will be competing with companies like Activision and Blizzard, which spend billions of dollars each year on a select number of games. The Metaverse is the only place where this transformation can take place. That sum of money is necessary in order to create a game.
Given the disparity in funding, Cheng is of the opinion that it is unreasonable to anticipate that NFT-related games would be able to compete with such games in terms of the enjoyment they provide.
Instead, he is of the opinion that improvements need to be made to the underlying infrastructure before innovative gaming techniques such as StepVR’s technology, which the founder of the company likens to the technology seen in the science fiction film Ready Player One directed by Steven Spielberg, can shake up the game industry.
According to Cora from Polygon, a platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development and Web3, the biggest difficulty with pay-to-play games is that the creators do not know how to integrate the gameplay experience with the income potential and sustainability.
When participants in the Web 2 gaming sector shift to it, a large number of them will immediately start to worry about building the tokenomics, but they won’t really think about how to improve the overall quality of the gaming.
She also made the remark that the lifespans of Web3 games are shorter due to the fact that players are more interested with generating money than they are with genuinely having pleasure playing the games.
U-Zyn shared the same sentiment, reiterating how important it is for the overall quality of the game to be high. He asserted that in order to make the economy more viable, the creators should, rather than artificially inflating it, think about creating something within the game that offers true advantages to the users.
Modifying the Way Traditional Gaming Is Played
The panelists have, up until this point, given the impression that they are focusing on the game’s accessibility and overall quality. However, what exactly are the elements that make it a fun game? In light of the fact that this was a very subjective topic, there were several points of view expressed even among the panelists.
The creator of StepVR, Cheng, believes that conquering the technological obstacles of building the Metaverse is a far more challenging endeavor than looking for fun content. Also, in Cheng’s experience, creating original gameplay is much more challenging than porting an established game format to the Metaverse. As a result, rather than press oneself to invent a novel gameplay mechanism, he suggests just switching to a different approach.
According to what he stated, people absolutely like it when you utilize the gameplay from other video games like Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and PUBG in your own game. Imagine players of PUBG moving around in a virtual environment; that is what happens in the Metaverse, and it is at this time that they have the opportunity to include tokenomics within, since the focus is on enjoying the experience rather than concentrating on the financial component of the game.
Cheng asserted that StepVR has demonstrated and validated this concept via their work, citing the fact that they developed a Counter-Strike clone game that was incredibly straightforward to assemble the previous year. Within StepVR’s virtual reality arena, the company’s creator said that the game has successfully hosted more than 700,000 players for a single round of play.
To the contrary, Cora offers a novel viewpoint. To promote mass adoption of the Metaverse, she thinks it’s crucial to have crypto-native intellectual property, and she’s had conversations with cryptocurrency game entrepreneurs who say they want to make the Web3 equivalent of Counter-Strike or PUBG. She thinks having IP that is local to the blockchain is crucial. Though she is generally supportive of innovation, she does have some concerns about these new companies.
She challenges the veracity of the assertion that the platform has attracted a significant number of Web2 users. Cora cited the well-known peer-to-peer (P2E) game Axie Infinity as an example of a crypto-native game that was developed and released with commercial success.
The Future of Gaming Is In Metaverse
Putting playability to the side for a while, one of the next aims for the community is to achieve widespread adoption. According to Cheng, giving priority to the infrastructure is one of the most important things that can be done to promote wider use of the technology.
As for Cora, Polygon will surely play a part in supporting the public acceptance of the future of gaming due to the fact that they have worked with well-known firms like as EA, Activision, and a number of other companies.
U-Zyn has remarked that he would want to see a greater number of people using the blockchain technology because of the potential it possesses. It was his contention that NFTs take advantage of immutability. One of the most important things that he brought up was the fact that open execution and open global stake machine, two additional components of blockchains, are not being utilized at this time.
As a consequence of this, according to U-Zyn, the future of GameFi is comprised of games that conduct NFTs and stake them outside of the game in addition to games that make use of an open global stake mechanism that players can have faith in (decentralized gaming and finance). They are giving up a sizeable amount of the advantages offered by blockchain technology since they are only employing NFT for GameFi and the Metaverse.
While it would appear that the panelists aren’t universally optimistic about the state of pay-to-play (P2P) games at the moment, particularly in terms of playability, they do appear to have optimism for the business as a whole.
Myrtle Anne, who chaired the panel and is the co-founder and CEO of Place War as well as the creator and CEO of Block Tides, came to the conclusion that the paradigm should transition from a play to earn viewpoint to a play and earn one. She is also the founder and CEO of Block Tides.
Battle Infinity Shines Bright
The objection that profits are prioritized over competence is reasonable, however, it should be noted that this is not always the case with play-to-earn games. There are still games, such as Battle Infinity, in which a substantial amount of skill is required to gain money.
This website, which is situated in India, allows users to participate in a fantasy sports competition called the IBAT Premier League. Players have the option to purchase NFTs that are modeled after their preferred real-life athletes and then employ those figures in the construction of their teams.
The IBAT Premier League gives non-fantasy players (NFTs) more value, dependent on how well real-life players do in the league. At the conclusion of each campaign, the title of a champion goes to the squad that finished with the most points. In addition, the platform’s native token, IBAT, is used as the currency for the prizes that are given out.
It takes a great degree of talent to compete in Battle Infinity, just as it does in other forms of fantasy sports. Players need to have an understanding of the dynamics of the sports they play in the real world in order to know which athletes to choose and how to stack their teams. In addition, because wins are only given out to victors, players are required to put in the effort before they can earn anything.
Anyone who wants to play Battle Infinity has to have some prior experience in a sporting discipline. In addition, in contrast to the majority of pay-to-win games, this one demands strategy. It is not enough to just be able to strike certain key sequences on a keyboard in order to compete against another player.
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