PLAY TO EARN
This tagline has recently been promoted as a mantra to lure newbies (people who are not very tech-savvy or new to the gaming world) by the start-up GameDeFi, NFT projects.
If you've ever heard an enthusiast of crypto, GameDeFi, or NFT whispers about the easy ability to make money, that recalls the pyramid scheme in the past with the slogan 'financial independence'. You will find something in common. Most of the projects or start-up gameDeFi are scams that are the opinion of many net citizens. There were many cases, the founders took all money and ran away. They left the participants desperate and angry. Just use your google search skills, you will know this information.
Playing games to make money existed before Blockchain technology, cryptocurrency was born. In the glory days of the online gaming world, the players collected items in many famous titles like World of Warcraft, Lineage, Perfect Word also made money by selling them. They exchanged their items with other players offline for real money without any decentralized platforms. Trading activities are also active without any trendy technology titles such as NFT or gameDeFi, etc. Other gamers have worked hard to practice skills, manipulation, coordination, and team up with teammates to participate in international e-sport tournaments and won many prizes up to millions of dollars. Those players earned money by playing a game before the slogan "play to earn" appeared.
The instability of "play to earn" also comes from the difficulties in the economic balance in the game when you think about game design. The current monetization model of NFT games solely relies on the pyramid model that multi-level marketing teams have used. The latter player will feed the first player, and the last player will be the one who will suffer the most consequences. In regular online games, players will have to pay to experience the game, so game designers and manufacturers will have to work hard to keep the in-game economy balances.
For big titles like World of Warcraft that attracted more than seven million players at their peak, keeping the economy balanced and running is equivalent to the work of a policymaker for one of the large cities in the real world. There are not many people who can actually do this job in the world. In online games like this, the interests of entertainment service providers and service users are separate and towards different directions.
However, in GameDefi or NFT, the income from the token (NFT: non-fungible token) causes a conflict of interest between the players and the game makers/publisher. Both parties aim to make a lot of money, lots of value from tokens. In a place where everyone wants to make money and get rich, there is bound to be a market where any market can bubble. A bubble occurs when people buy something because the price is going up, and the buying back pushes the price up further.
Welcome to the new bubble wave of GameDeFi and NFT projects.