What is Play-To-Earn?
When some thought that the NFT hype was dying down, news of Axie Infinity’s surge in token price and players showed that this might be just the beginning.
As of 3 August 2021, Axie Infinity, created by Sky Mavis, has the highest protocol revenue for the past month, as compared with other top protocols such as Ethereum, Uniswap and Binance Smart Chain.
Why is everyone hopping onto the Axie Infinity bandwagon and what exactly is play-to-earn?
Traditional Gaming
Traditional gaming has always been a pay-to-win model. Players pay to unlock features, which can give them certain advantages in the game, and exclusive in-game content. For those who do not want to pay, the game ultimately still provides fun and entertainment to them.
However, in traditional games, in-game currencies and purchases have no value in the real world. Furthermore, they are non-transferrable which will remain locked in the gaming world.
NFT Gaming
Decentralised, blockchain-built games focus on creating value for developers and players so that it benefits everyone in the gaming ecosystem. When a player purchases a gaming gear in the form of an NFT, this gear can be transferred to other interconnected games or exchanged for cryptocurrencies.
Players own their in-game assets — they can sell the assets or transfer them to other games on the same network. Even if the game has shut down, users will not lose their in-game purchases.
Play-To-Earn
Play-to-earn is a new concept in gaming whereby users play games to collect rewards in the form of NFTs. Due to Covid-19, millions of jobs were lost and income was reduced, resulting in many people earning money through other means such as gaming. This perpetuated the rise of play-to-earn across the world. Play-to-earn games such as Axie Infinity and The Sandbox have been extremely popular nowadays. According to Axie Infinity’s tweet, it has 350,000 daily active users, which is an incredible growth considering that it is less than 3 years old.
Blockchain opens up to endless possibilities, including the creation of jobs and income sources that we could never have imagined in the past. While Axie Infinity’s popularity has shown to be a successful use case of gaming NFTs, it takes time for the rest of the world to adopt blockchain technology.
