Play to Earn

What is Play-to-Earn

Play-to-Earn (P2E) is a group of games with built-in tools for earning money.

Often games from the P2E sector are combined into a more global GameFi segment. This is actually an ideology of combining games with tools for earning money. The name itself is a derivative of “game” and “finance”.

There are several projects that claim to be pioneers on the P2E market. Most often Huntercoin is considered to be the “father” of the trend.

The project was created by the Xaya company. In Huntercoin, the developers were among the first to offer players to mine coins, which could then be exchanged for real money. The blockchain project was released in February 2014.

How does P2E work

The term itself answers almost all questions. Absolutely, in the P2E concept, players can actually make money playing games.

Players in traditional games can also buy in-game items. But do they own them? Not really. Players have a license to a digital copy stored on a central server. If the company goes bankrupt and the server goes down or disappears, the in-game item and the certificate of ownership disappears with that very server.

So in fact, Play-to-Earn is actually an economic business model built on blockchains using smart contracts and other decentralized mechanisms and features. To put it simply, players can play a game and earn crypto. In addition, Non-Fungible tokens or NFTs are being integrated into blockchain games. This is a more convenient way of digital assets for the gaming sector. After all, every item, characters, skins, rewards and more can be tokenized using this technology. Meanwhile, it is NFTs that give gamers full control over their in-game items. In addition, most blockchain-based games provide trading platforms for trading and better interaction between players, where they can exchange, buy and sell virtual items, generating additional income from reselling and exchanging them. Also, most blockchain-based games run marketplaces for trading and better interaction between players where they can exchange, buy and sell virtual items while earning extra income on their resale and exchange.

Note that blockchain enables the development of multichain P2E games, allowing people to play from smartphones, PCs and browsers alike.

Consider the play-to-earn principle on the example of the popular P2E game STEPN. The project is built on the Solana blockchain. The developers offered players to buy digital sneakers. All virtual “shoes” of STEPN are presented in NFT format.

Within the framework of the project, players can monetize their physical activity. To do this, they need to “shoe” into digital sneakers and start moving. GPS reads changes in a person’s location and analyzes the distance traveled. Depending on the activity results and the technical features of the sneakers, the app pays out rewards in native GST tokens.

To remain objective, there is also an important fact to note. The fact is that crypto-games tend to lose popularity very quickly, and often close down altogether. However, blockchain games, thanks to the popularity of the entire cryptocurrency industry and wide economic opportunities, one after another appear on the market, attracting a huge amount of attention. For example, in 2022, this is how the game STEPN was released, but after a short time its profitability dropped significantly, and many experts saw in the project the signs of a pyramid scheme. However, this did not prevent early players from making good money.

Also, note that it was STEPN that became the driving force behind the development of the Move-To-Earn sector.

Examples of Play to Earn crypto games

• The SandBox
• Axie Infinity
• Chainmonsters
• Ember Sword
• Illuvium
• Gods Unchained

Conclusion

Today the GameFi industry, including the P2E section, boasts the more popular Tap-to-Earn trend. This is a relatively young trend in the cryptocurrency space.

Under this model, users are able to monetize their gaming time and resources, with notorious projects such as; Catizen, Hamster Kombat, X Empire, Notcoin and many others. This means that the development of the GameFi industry, including Play-To-Earn, once again confirm the key ability to scale, unlocking the broad potential of the gaming sector. Through blockchain-related innovations, cryptogaming is stimulating game designers and gamers to move from Web2 to decentralized Web3 model.