While blockchain gaming and the play-to-earn model has taken off in recent years, many veterans of the gaming industry argue that they are fundamentally unstable. They maintain that games like Axie Infinity are the brainchild of financial engineers looking to get rich quickly, rather than experienced developers looking to build time-honored titles.
“Most GameFi developers are not game developers,” said Maciej Burno, who’s spearheading the new metaverse business of Polish gaming studio Reality.
Burno and others like him, are trying to counter the public impression that play-to-earn, Web3 games are all scammy and not much fun to play. Instead, they’re looking to build games that are both fun and sustainable, while introducing cryptos as a novel way to incentivize both gamers and creators.
Many of the play-to-earn titles aren’t really games by strict definition, said See Wan Toong, CTO of Web3 gaming startup Red Door Digital. “They are more akin to decentralized finance, or DeFi, products with gamified features. Hardcore gamers dismiss Axie Infinity as “simple” or even “boring,” not unlike the free-to-play, mindless mobile games that they have opposed for years.
To make a blockchain game sustainable, Toong’s Red Door Digital is taking a different approach from Axie Infinity. Users aren’t required to buy the platform’s tokens in order to start playing, unless they want to start earning or have real value in their assets.
“All this increase in value then goes to the people who are playing to get financial returns,” said Toong.
While developers are still working to optimize their token economy, investors are already throwing big money at their nascent ventures. Blockchain games brought in a whopping $2.5 billion in funding in Q2, according to DappRadar.
Despite all the money coming in, some legacy studios and publishers have remained on the side of cautiousness, with others like Tencent vowing they would never enter into such a market.
“Reputation is a big thing for the corporate, so if anyone who creates this initiative fails, it’s the end of their career,” said Toong. They will have to answer the board. So the only way is for them to invest in a crypto company or two to see how it goes.”
(All information was provided by TechCrunch)
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