1 min read

Free-to-play-to-earn

Most serious video games cost money. You buy the game disk or digital download and start playing. This is the way games were monetized from the beginning. It's direct and makes sense to people.

Some games have experimented with alternative monetization strategies, of course. Notably, the advent of mobile phones brought an expectation/appetite for free apps. People might pay $50 for a console game, but would never pay $50 for a phone app.

Gaming companies responded with free-to-play games. Anyone can jump in and start having fun for no money up front. At some point, you charge money in-app to a relatively small percentage of high value players.

Cut to play-to-earn games built on blockchain. These games are often expensive to get into. You have to buy a few NFTs or some tokens just to get in the door. The audience for these games is fine with this, though, because they're not in it for the play. They're focused on the earning.

Most play-to-earn games today just aren't particularly fun. It's a grind to earn. This deepens the divide between "real games" and "blockchain scams" in the minds of gamers.

For blockchain to be commonplace in mainstream games, we need free-to-play-to-earn games. Players should be able to play an actually fun game without putting up any money and earn real blockchain-backed NFTs and cryptocurrency. Sure, you'll sell some of these assets to players who want to level up faster or get special bonuses that are only available through purchase, but not every player needs to put up money to enjoy the game.

-Luke

P.S. A free-to-play-to-earn game is only possible on a free-to-use blockchain. There are some blockchains that understand this (WAX, HIVE), but they lack smart contracts. If you want a blockchain that will enable your dApp to become fully decentralized over time and not just act as an account and inventory database, Koinos is the only option today.