Creator Economy - Is Play to Earn Gaming a Ponzi Scheme?
Dear subscribers, Some of my fondest memories are from gaming - killing demons in Diablo, traveling through time in Chrono Trigger, and fighting space battles in Starcraft. As a lifelong gamer, I’ve often lamented as mobile gaming’s rise came with a focus on monetization at the sacrifice of fun. I’m not alone. Diablo Immortal got an all-time low Metacritic score of 0.4 thanks to its pay-to-win mechanics. This brings us to the latest monetization trend: Play to earn. Play to earn lets players earn in-game items in the form of NFTs and tokens that they can then cash out for real-world profit. Millions of dollars have been poured into play to earn games and top publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix are jumping aboard.
Let’s dive into:
Today’s post is brought to you by…Manticore Games Everyone talks about the metaverse, but building virtual worlds and games isn’t easy. Manticore Games is the developer and operator for Core, a metaverse platform for people who want to build virtual worlds. Over 50,000 user-generated experiences already use Core. Core recently added MetaMask and OpenSea support to power metaverse worlds for NFT projects such as MekaVerse, 0N1 Force, and Crypto Chicks. Check out Manticore’s careers page if you’re interested in web3 and the metaverse. They have openings in engineering, art, marketing, and more. What is play to earn?Here’s how play to earn works:
Let’s cover the bull and bear case for this new model:
So which case is the reality? Let’s take a look at two popular play to earn apps - Axie Infinity and STEPN. The rise and fall of Axie InfinityAxie Infinity is a game where you battle digital pets:
People primarily play Axie to make money. There are two customer segments:
Axie Infinity’s developer, Sky Mavis, also gets a 4.25% cut of all transactions. So how is the game doing? Here’s the bull and bear case:
Here’s the core problem with Axie:
That’s essentially what Axie has experienced (a recent $650M hack didn’t help): After months of incredible growth, the daily earnings of the typical player of Axie Infinity (a "scholar" in the Philippines) have fallen below the Philippines' minimum wage line for all but the high ranking players, and even they have seen earnings decline since August The Axie team is working on a free to play version of the game along with other efforts, but it’s unclear if players will come back. Can STEPN avoid the same fate?A token economy relies on supply and demand. As we’ve seen from Axie, a play to earn game’s token price craters when:
STEPN is the latest play to earn game to capture people’s attention, reaching 3M active users in record time. Dubbed “move to earn,” STEPN works as follows:
So far, this sounds very similar to Axie, except you need to walk outside to earn tokens instead of battling virtual pets. What I find interesting is that the STEPN team actually published a post called “Are all play-to-earn games Ponzi?” back in April. This post shows that the STEPN team is very aware of play to earn’s pitfalls. To maintain the token economy, the’ve taken steps to:
Nevertheless, GST token price has cratered (ironically shortly after STEPN published the post in April): And users have also declined by 50%: The STEPN team discovered that:
The team is already spending nearly half of its resources to fight cheaters who are faking motion data. Is play to earn here to stay?So is play to earn a Ponzi? Let’s be honest:
Very few games can achieve #2 because fun and money are usually at the opposite ends of the gaming spectrum (poker is a good exception). I think play to earn today is more Ponzi than not. The play to earn games that I’ve tried feel more like DeFi protocols with a game UI than actual games. For web3 gaming to be sustainable, I think we need to see:
Let’s use a hypothetical Diablo online game to imagine how this might work:
This is how I think games can integrate NFTs without pissing people off.
Less catchy for sure, but also less Ponzi. If you liked this post from Creator Economy by Peter Yang, why not share it? |
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