In this article, we will discover the difficulties for Play To Earn and the future for it.
The Difficulties for Play-To-Earn
Before you can play-to-earn, you need to pay-to-play.
For example, when you want to play Axie Infinity, you need to own 3 Axies. Players used to be able to get started with $5 to $10. But the price of Axies has risen due to the game’s popularity, so this might be a large investment for many players. Right now, the minimum price for an Axie is over $200, so gamers need to spend at least $600 to play. Axies can breed up to seven times before they go sterile.
Another Play-To-Earn game is CryptoBlades also requires around $300/account to start playing. This amount of money is a lot with casual gamers when they start playing a new game.
To become mainstream, Play-To-Earn games need to learn some features from traditional games:
Anyone can participate
Free-To-Play or if you need to Pay-To-Play, it should be a low cost
The Play-To-Earn feature needs to be flexible
The in-game money also shouldn't fluctuate too much to stabilize the cost and profit
The Infrastructure and gameplay
The layer that Play-To-Earn games are using is very important. Continuing with the Axie example, this game uses the layer 2 Ronin protocol, and it’s not a good idea for now. Because to handle a massive transaction with a smooth in-game experience and low cost, Ethereum blockchain now can not respond to it.
For many hardcore or long-time gamers, the difference between traditional games and blockchain games is significantly big. The gameplay of blockchain games now is boring, with simple in-game artwork and design. If blockchain games want to attract the gamers community instead of the speculators, they need to be changed.
The Future for Play-To-Earn
Will Play-To-Earn can keep developing or will it be a bubble? As personal thought, Play-To-Earn can be a long-term part of blockchain technology and metaverse in the future.
The evolution of blockchain gaming
NFT gaming has appeared with CryptoKitties since 2017, players can only buy eggs and hatch them to collect NFT cats. After that, we can see some new names on this market with the most popular one currently being Axie Infinity.
In the next generations of blockchain gaming, the developers need to fix and improve the difficulties listed below to bring a good experience and better quality game for gamers. These new games should be easy to access, require low cost to play, and a smooth experience when playing.
Storage and Randomness
Storage is a very serious subject that every blockchain game should be careful of. Saving data on a blockchain like Ethereum can be very expensive. It could cost 60,000 gwei to store 1GB of data on Ethereum. That’s the reason why if blockchain gaming wants to become more mainstream, storage will be an important factor that every game developer needs to solve.
Besides the storage problem, Randomness is another factor that makes gamers should or should not play. If a game has not had a randomness mechanism, gamers will not play it because this game cannot keep the balance and equality between gamers.
Conclusion
Play-To-Earn can be a long-term trend and also have many areas to improve and develop. However, right now there are too many hypes and FOMO around this trend. When you participate in a Play-To-Earn game, you are not a gamer but also an investor. So be careful and research strictly before joining in this trend.