The idea of play-to-earn games has been around for quite some time. I still remember my days of grinding GPs on Runescape or selling power-leveled characters from World of Warcraft. It was quite a fun way to finance my desktop gaming PC needs.
Today, making money from games has become a bit more complex yet rewarding. With the advent of blockchain technology, game companies have started to take advantage of non-fungible tokens as a way to peg some in-game items into cryptocurrency with real intrinsic value. They know that there is an important part of the gaming community who puts in long hours grinding and farming and then trading in-game currency or items with other players.
But, what if items and currency had real-world value and could be traded just like other cryptocurrencies, or even be used to buy products online?
This is what games like Axie, Sandbox, or Decentraland have been doing for quite a while now.
Sandbox and Decentraland use their own in-game currency which are basic ERC-20 tokens called Sand and Mana respectively. You can buy in-game items and trade using these coins, but you can also take them outside the game. The platforms also allow users to buy non-fungible tokens of finite units of land where you can build upon, host games, or customize to offer other players unique experiences, and then monetize.
It is a fun way of making money and putting those grinding hours on real work.
Axie is the most popular play-to-earn platform right now and is based on successful gaming experiences and fads such as Pokemon and old-school Tamagotchis. You collect common, rare, or legendary creatures, raise them, breed them and battle them for XP. Each Axie is a non-fungible token so they can be traded for real cryptocurrency, and the more time and effort you spend on it, the more valuable it gets.
The market for these games is growing fast, and some players are really interested in investing in virtual in-game real estate. Last summer, a digital real estate investment fund called Republic Realm bought a patch of Decentraland for almost USD 1 million.
Big names in the gaming industry are taking notice. Ubisoft recently showed interest in developing blockchain games, calling them a revolution in the industry and declaring their intention of becoming one of the key players in the field. Electronic Arts forecast a shift in the gaming industry towards play-to-earn structures. EA has been known for its efforts to participate in the huge gaming economy with mixed results, so it is not surprising that they want to dip their toes into the blockchain ocean.
Facebook´s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced his Metaverse project and has onboarded close to 10.000 devs to develop it in the European Union alone. The idea is to build a virtual world of interconnected realities that can be molded at will by developers and users alike. However, given the nature of the online environment, I doubt a single company or even consortium would be able to corner the virtual world real estate market since it can be made as big as we want it to. We just have to make sure our desktop gaming PCs have enough processing power to take full advantage of the new economic system that awaits us. We don’t want to be caught with our pants down when this virtual economy kicks in.
Getting a future-proof desktop gaming PC is now easier than ever. Head to www.clxgaming.com and get the perfect rig to enter these amazing virtual worlds and prepare for what the future has in store.
