Large investments in decentralized gaming/play-to-earn economy
Gaming in 2021 highlighted three major ideas: play to earn (P2E), guilds (organized groups of gamers), and raising of Axie Infinity.
For quite some time, Flow, a blockchain for games, has been around. However, subsequent advances have occurred, such as Axie Infinity developing its ecosystem blockchain for all future games.
Developers opt to create play-to-earn games on blockchains that provide minimal transaction fees, speedy executions, and settlements for their players, allowing them to access a large audience with low entry barriers. Microsoft PlayFab is still used to make a lot of games. Only certain parts, including tokens and NFTs, are now deployed directly on-chain due to their play-to-earn structure. Infrastructure businesses like Stardust, who outsource NFT management for users, help to facilitate such advancements. We may see more conventional games, including chess and backgammon, migrate to P2E and be completely deployed on-chain in 2022, including computing and graphics.
More games will be implemented directly on-chain in 2022, with permanent storage and NFTs representing various levels that may be sold on a gaming marketplace. Companies like Animoca are pioneering blockchain-based gaming. They presently have eight blockchain-based games, including the virtual world Sandbox, which has received large funding from Softbank and has teamed with Adidas and Atari. For NFT collections, Animoca brands have teamed with Formula 1 and football clubs such as Bayern Munich and Manchester City. Major blockchain native entertainment studios that work on gaming and NFT projects will continue to grow.
Furthermore, traditional gaming businesses such as EA, Activision Blizzard, and others will enter the blockchain gaming market in 2022. Having said that, many play-to-earn games feature ambitious release dates, and many games in development will have to choose between speed and quality.
In 2022, it will be clear which blockchains are best for game creation. Flow has demonstrated its potential for game deployment, while other blockchains, such as Solana (which has cheap transaction costs and high throughput), offer the most flexibility.
Because blockchain-based gaming necessitates the ownership of native-to-the-game NFTs and then allows players to earn tokens while they play, some gamers may be unable to afford the initial expenditure required to purchase the game’s NFTs. This has resulted in scholarship projects, in which owners of NFTs loan them to players known as scholars. These scholars then devote time to the game and receive rewards. The rewards are then shared between the scholars and the game’s NFT owner. Gaming guilds have sprung up as a result of this. The Yield Gaming Guild, is a good example of this, founded in 2018, has 100,000 members, 18,500 Yield Guild Badge holders, 32 scholarship managers, and over 10,000 Axie Infinity scholars spread around Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, Brazil, and Europe.
Guild administrators must maintain a consistent membership for the guild to gain additional tokens. Guild management for NFTs with a swift rise and decrease in value, on the other hand, causes treasury management issues, such as how to allocate funds appropriately. In 2022, software management systems centered on guild administration will be a hot topic.
In blockchain gaming, there hasn’t been much research into creating games that don’t quickly lose player interest. Axie Infinity’s daily revenue increased from $10,000 at the start of March 2021 to $17.5 million at its peak. However, revenue has now dropped, demonstrating how rapidly the blockchain ecosystem’s interests can shift.
Shifting interests and new blockchain game releases can be blamed for some of the quick surge and fall in revenue. We’ll probably see more of this in 2022, therefore the focus shifts to how to create a blockchain-native game with play-to-earn features that can pique players’ long-term interest.
In addition, more money will be invested in play-to-earn companies, to the point that new venture capital funds dedicated to blockchain gaming are being established. (For example, Spartan raised $50 million for its Metaverse & Gaming Fund.) In January, FTX announced the formation of a $2 billion fund, with Amy Wu leading investments and M&A for a gaming-focused FTX sector.
About us:
NFT Labs is a web3 company exploring big ideas in community, utility and engagement to push the crypto, NFT and metaverse space forward. To learn how your organization can participate in the web3 revolution, write to us at hello@itsmyne.club.
We’re backed by leading blockchain institutions including Longhash Ventures, Antler, Oracles Investment Group, and Shima Capital among others. NFT Labs is also the issuer of the MYNE token ($MYNE), a BEP-20 utility token for Itsmyne and partner applications. MYNE serves as the gateway between traditional social media and blockchain-based social economies.
