How Has Play and earn Transformed The Gaming Industry For Developers?

The Play-to-Earn business model has been popularized recently by games such as Axie Infinity. Numerous other games and metaverses are following in its footsteps to set up the P2E business model.

Experts from the blockchain and gaming industry have considered this a revolution. This can transform the gaming industry forever for everyone involved - be it the gamers, the companies, or even the developers.

However, before I jump in to discuss how the P2E model has benefited the developers, let me give the uninitiated a quick recap of blockchain gaming, NFTs, and other jargon oriented with Play-to-Earn

A Quick Overview of Blockchain Gaming

Blockchain

Blockchain technology is essentially a decentralized ledger where all records of transactions are stored in a distributed fashion amongst various nodes in the system. It is secure and immutable, and the information within these records is much safer than a centralized server system.

NFTs

NFTs is one of the niches that leverages blockchain technology. It stands for Non-Fungible Tokens, meaning that every token/NFT is unique and not divisible. In the context of gaming, any in-game assets such as weapons, skins, costumes, magic portions, etc., can be in the form of NFTs.

Blockchain Gaming

Blockchain gaming is essentially a niche that combines NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology. The idea behind this niche is to develop people-centric games such that the time, energy, and money that people invest in the game can help them gain monetary value.

Let me give you a small example that can explain all these concepts together.

Example

Consider a hypothetical generic game with characters, battles, quests, leaderboards, etc. Now players would try to buy/unlock characters, upgrade them with weapons and skins, and even participate in tournaments and quests to get on top of the leaderboard to gain rewards.

In a traditional game, all of these efforts would leave the gamers with zero real-world value. However, in a blockchain game, every asset you own would be an NFT. Every upgrade you make to your character would increase its value, and all these characters and assets would be NFTs that players could sell and gain real-world money.

Now that you’re all caught up let’s get to the main part of this article.

A People-Centric Ecosystem

Developers can use these tokens and make governance tokens so that the people who hold them can also determine what direction the game should progress in. This creates a two-way relationship between the developers and the gamers, forming an ecosystem where everyone gets what they want. Gamers can earn real-time money, while developers can expand their universe and earn more from it. Thus, the entire ecosystem grows.

Endless Possibilities

Since the developers can dictate their terms and conditions if they wish, they can make the complete system automated through smart contracts or make it run by the people. Smart contracts are codes that can include real-time parameters and conditions to be checked. So, for instance, if an NFT is rented from another player through a smart contract, the contract will automatically deduct the leasing fees.

While these are just two possibilities of how the game progresses, in reality, the number of directions the developers want to take are countably endless

Conclusion

Play-to-Earn as a business model has disrupted the gaming industry simply because it has given rise to an ecosystem where every stakeholder part of the industry benefits from it, and it’s a win-win situation for all.