And we’re just supporting his corpse…
It’s time for the Web3 gaming industry to acknowledge some cold truths. A thousand projects have soared – some meteoric – and almost all of them have crashed hard. The explanation for the “why” is simple, but ugly.
The concept of Play-2-Earn is fantastic. Make money playing video games! Of course, the model is more complex than that – money doesn’t fall from the sky! The value has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, with few exceptions (shout out to Splinterlands, Gods Unchained and I’m sure there are a few others), the value P2E gaming offers is rooted in asset speculation. “Oh, l don’t feel like this virtual $2000 piece of land. I just bet someone else is willing to pay $10,000 for it.”
Indeed, there have been winners in every ecosystem. Unfortunately, Web3 games often end up close to zero – there should are winners and losers. In the worst case scenario, the only winners are the developers who sold the project. All users become losers because they have surrendered precious capital for worthless assets. I’m not afraid to be unyieldingly transparent – my own project, Draco Dice, started this way (although there is a happy ending towards the end of the article). Consumers believed that an exit strategy needed to be implemented that would allow them to hoard many thousands of digital dice so that as interest in the assets grew, they would hold onto heaps of assets for which demand, and thus value, had increased. While I personally strove to dispel the illusion that my NFTs existed to benefit everyone, the illusion remained strong.
At best, the “winners” in a Web3 ecosystem are those who knew better. They knew money would run out, user growth would grind to a halt, and anyone still holding on would be holding a useless bag. The smart ones left early. On this point, too, I’ve been humble – naive to believe that assets I’ve held worth tens of thousands in USD would grow to even greater heights through a miracle of increasing user engagement.
Having thoroughly destroyed my own financial ethos for you here, I must now justify my faith in the winners of the future.
Regardless of how cringy the term has become, I am unmistakably, unabashedly a “gamer.” That is a person with a passion for spell. The problem is that the gaming industry outside of Web3 is gradually eroding consumer agencies. If you’re trying to succeed with Web3 gaming, you should already know this – but here’s a quick history lesson to catch up.
How we got here
First, gamers owned physical media. Compact Discs and Game Cassettes. Then Steam and other huge platforms took over with digital distribution. Suddenly most games were no longer physically manufactured and could only be delivered digitally – but most digital games weren’t property. Instead, the consumer purchased a license to access the software. This permit can of course be revoked at any time and for almost any reason. With Games as a Service (GaaS) becoming an industry standard, consumers have even fewer rights! All the work you put into an online experience can disappear once the developers decide to shut down the servers.
In other words, gamers own nothing but their hardware (and even that is arguable because of EULAs and ToS provided by OS and console makers).
I’m deep, deep in the game hole and I’ll never get out – my skin is pale and my eyes have grown accustomed to the harsh blue light of the screens. So it is clear that the potential for the increased agency for gamers offered by Non-Fungible Tokens would be phenomenal. Think about it – we could really own the games themselves, again. We could really own assets that we have bought or earned in a game and even taken outside the game to get even more use out of it. We could sell them with developers’ support instead of arranging illegal transactions through black market websites (which I’m not ashamed to say I’ve used – we have no choice). And we can resell the games ourselves if we decide we’re done with them.
If you’re the kind of person I intended to read this article and you share my love for games, then this vision for the future should excite and inspire you.
If you compare it to the reality of what Play-2-Earn has done for us, something looks awful, awful.
Nice reality check
The first lesson the P2E industry should have learned is that “the game has to be fun first and monetize second.” That lesson has yet to be thoroughly disseminated. Button-click token manipulation tools have ruled Web3 gaming outside of the aforementioned exceptions, and even then “fun” remains an afterthought in most Web3 games designed. No one plays this stuff because they are having a good time with the experience itself. Everyone is looking for those sweet, sweet tokens. It’s all rocket emojis and calls to HODL, just like everywhere else in crypto.
This is not gaming!
The idea of living off video games doesn’t exist right now – anywhere. It’s a lie and a scam. Survival bias is doomed – of course someone takes off with a profit. Recognizing this fact was transformative for me, as I realized that there is no way to sell Play-2-Earn to real gamers.
Trust me – gamers can smell crap, and because of the bad rap Web3 has gotten with endless scams and pump-and-dumps, P2E stinks of them. Justly.
You and me – we see the hard benefits gamers can receive from participating in a Web3 ecosystem – but in the end, Web3 gaming can’t be about Web3. There’s no Play-2-Earn where we’re going – but we can still provide agency and revenue. We should just stop selling games like they exist because you can earn money. STOP! To disrupt the gaming market, this has to happen.
This is a gold mine, right here. Build great games without compromise through Web3, offering a cost-effective Web3 utility on top of great gameplay.
I promised a happy ending earlier. This is what me and my team have been building towards. Yes, we sell NFTs, but they don’t come into the limelight. It’s not the stars. The only kind of game that can become sustainable is one that players want to engage in repeatedly – because they enjoy it. That’s why I personally took an L for the short-term outcome of an otherwise very successful launch of Draco Dice – because it’s not important. What is important are the benefits that NFTs can provide to players who: play to play.
How to save Web3 gaming
For example, when I launched Draco Dice, it was to create a standard for game resources usable in more than one game. This will come to fruition in a few months – we have
simultaneously co-developed Draco Dice: Skirmish and Draco Dicesweeper. Both can be played with the same Draco Dice NFTs – with a real, undeniable utility that has never existed before in the colossal world of video games. With that on the table, now what?
Web3 needs to approach gamers where they are. Gamers don’t care about wallets, tokens, exchanges or any other financial geeks we struggle with to make a profit. Gamers care about the game. I’m strictly not suggesting that we cover up putting Web3 technology to work – I’m suggesting, however, that we use language that gamers are used to. Gamers understand XP levels, battle passes, currencies and even markets – but it’s up to us to streamline the experience of interacting with Web3 to break what would otherwise be considered barriers to entry, like manually creating a wallet for it. or that chain outside the username/password/2FA structure that gamers are used to.
last, speculation should be countered or eliminated as much as possible. Retail investors water down the purity of a product ostensibly intended to be enjoyed as entertainment. A community full of people looking to make a profit is not the same as a community full of people wanting to know when the next content update is because they want to experience more of your product personally. One is here to play. The other is only here to make money. To that end, the ability of retail investors to inflate the perceived value of gaming NFTs must be directly attacked.
The clearest way to achieve this is to constantly reward gameplay and not offer high-ticket assets outside of gameplay. Retail investors can easily access valuable assets in a thousand other places – but if we want to seriously break into gaming itself, none other than the players who achieve skill, progress and participation should have that kind of power.
If all this were to happen, one would certainly be tempted to ask how there are exceptions to Play-2-Earn’s passing – and the answer is that those exceptions are already moving in that direction. Splinterlands and Gods Unchained are built on great gameplay, with the aim of having a great time. Do they both have to keep selling new assets to stay afloat? Yes of course! But that’s no different from any other game studio that has to release new DLC, battle passes or other microtransactions on a regular basis. After all, the income has to flow.
Play-2-Earn is dead and much of Web3 has yet to recognize it. There’s money in it today, there will be money in it tomorrow, and the decline of P2E will be a gradual process – but just as wise men advise to view the bear market as a “construction market”, I must point out that the flesh is on the rise. rot. The absence of flies should not be taken as a sign of health.
We can build better products and services than this, and that’s where the future champions of Web3 are now making their claim.
Inner Article Image Credit: provided by the author; Thank you!
Featured Image Credits: Cottonbro; Pexels; Thank you!
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