Beginners guide to GameFi and Play-to-Earn

Blockchain is penetrating every section of the industry. Today, blockchain is helping to create next-level apps including decentralized finance, governance, dApps, marketplaces, entertainment, socialization, and more. And not just it provides a decentralized system but also deals with some featured problems like money, reliability, interoperability, transparency, managing the identity along with data, etc. In this article, we will cover one of the most important and growing sectors - gaming, where blockchain is disrupting big time.

The Play-to-Earn model

Today we will talk about blockchain games. The next level gaming experience where gamers can play-to-earn. Through the play-to-earn model, the gamers are encouraged to make more investments in skill, time, effort, and cash in exchange for entertainment. Within the game environments, the users are empowered to have true ownership of digital assets they own in the game. While there is no compromising in the entertainment, the blockchain game’s play-to-earn model provides players extra opportunities to earn money as well.

Think of the most popular game we played: Farmville. The player owns the land, plowed it, sows the crop, and harvests it. At the end of the day, he also sells the crops in the market to earn some coins. The coins were then used to purchase more hybrid seeds, farming tools, extend farming space, build home and manage the livestock. After everything, the users get nothing but only entertainment and joyfulness of playing a game. The players don’t get to owe any of the digital assets. Even when the game is quit, everything build from scratch is lost. The blockchain’s play-to-earn model openly allow users to own all the virtual asset inside the game environment, which they can later trade for money.

What is GameFi?

First of all, the word ‘GameFi’ has originated by combining the words ‘Game’ and ‘Decentralized Finance’. It refers to the idea of playing video games on the decentralized application for lucrative money-making opportunities. In exchange for cryptocurrency tokens, the players can play games on various blockchain-based dApps. Also, GameFi games, keep the assets stored on the distributed network where the assets are less vulnerable to phishing attacks. Blockchain technology, allows players to have the sole proprietorship of their virtual assets of the game.

Most importantly, to generate rewards in the game, the users require high strategic skills and not just luck to win.

How play-to-earn model works for gamers?

On blockchain technology constructed play-to-earn games, the users earn virtual assets in the form of crypto tokens, NFTs, and staking. Also, users can be rewarded ‘time’ by many games through one of the digital assets mentioned above. It means, you can extend the playing time by staking any of the earned digital asset. Besides, when playing Axie Infinity game, users earn SLP tokens, which can be exchanged for fiat currency and stablecoins.

Furthermore, users can also sell, trade their digital assets like land, weapons in the form of NFTs to other marketplaces. Due to the uniqueness of these items, they are clone free. Therefore, to the market they hold great value for transaction. Such a thing can hold a value in millions. Recently, in Decetraland a virtual piece of land have been purchased for $1.3 million.

As all the assets gets store in blockchain, they are very much secure. The developer or publisher do not possess any right of ownership.

How to play on GameFi?

Firstly, you should have a crypto wallet to participate in the game. Not all wallets work with every crypto ecosystem. It is important to check your wallet compatibility before you start. For example, Axie Infinity is built using the Ethereum protocol, so you will need an Ethereum-compatible wallet like MetaMask to play.

Secondly, the wallet should have enough funds for the user to start playing. Further, few games have their own game’s cryptocurrency and the users might feel the process of getting the tokens a little lousy. For instance: in a very popular GameFi game Cryptoblades, users should have SKILL tokens in their MetaMask wallets. But to get SKILL tokens, they have to acquire Binance Coin (BNB) and trade for it. Isn’t it a complicated process?

While the concept of play-to-earn is very encouraging, at the same time it does demand some initial purchasing which can be costly. The player must buy some character or upgrade the chosen character before they start to play. The most costly example is the Axie Infinity game where users need to buy at least three NFTs (Axies) which might be as much as $600.

The GameFi aggregator - GameFi.org allows players to choose between games more conveniently. Many blockchain-based games such as Metaguards, Axie Infinity, Space Crypto, Bullieverse, Monsterra are a few of the favorite play-to-earn-based games.

Also, read - Edensol’s Solana based Metaverse brings a new Gaming experience