Play2Earn is dead

And we're just stalling his corpse...

It's time for the Web3 gaming industry to acknowledge some cold truths. A thousand projects grew – some meteoric – and nearly all of them crashed, hard. The explanation of "why" is simple, but ugly.

The concept of Play-2-Earn is fantastic. Make money playing video games! Of course, the model is more complex than that: money doesn't just appear out of thin air! Value has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, the value that P2E gaming offers, with few exceptions (thanks to Splinterlands, Gods Unchained, and I'm sure at least a few others), is rooted in asset speculation. "Oh, I have no use for that virtual $2,000 lot. I just bet someone else is willing to pay $10,000 for it."

Indeed, there have been winners in every ecosystem. Unfortunately, Web3 games often end up near zero money - there must be winners and losers. In the worst case, the only winners are the developers who sold the project. All users become losers, having given up valuable capital for assets left worthless. I'm not afraid to be adamantly transparent - my own project, Draco Dice, started out that way (although there's a happy ending near the end of the article). Consumers believed there was an exit strategy to be executed, allowing them to hoard many thousands of digital dice so that as interest in assets grew, they would hold mounds of assets for which demand, and therefore the value, had increased. Although I personally tried to break the illusion that my NFTs existed in order to provide benefits to everyone, the illusion was strong.

At best, the "winners" of a Web3 ecosystem are those who knew best. They knew the money would run out, user growth would stop, and everyone still holding would be holding a useless bag. The smart ones made their exit early. On this point, too, I was humble - naively believing that the assets I held worth tens of thousands of USD would grow even more by a miracle of increased user engagement.

Having completely destroyed my own financial philosophy for you here, I must now justify my faith in the winners of the future.

No matter how gratingly the term has become, I am undeniably and unapologetically a "gamer". He is a person who is passionate about gaming. The problem is that the gaming industry outside of Web3 has gradually eroded consumer agency. If you're trying to make it with Web3 games, you should already know that, but here's a quick history lesson to catch you up.

First, players owned physical media. Compact discs and game cartridges. Then Steam and other huge platforms took over with digital distribution. Suddenly, the majority of games were no longer physically manufactured and could only be delivered digitally - but the majority of digital games are not owned by . Instead, the consumer has purchased a license to access the software. This license can, of course, be revoked at any time and for virtually any reason. Now that games as a service (GaaS) is becoming an industry standard, consumers have even fewer rights! All the work you put into an online experience can disappear as soon as the developers decide to shut down the servers.

In other words, players only own their hardware (and even that is debatable due to EULAs and terms of service provided by OS and console manufacturers).

I'm deep, deep in the game hole and never come out - my skin has paled and my eyes have adjusted to the harsh blue light of screens. Thus, it is evident that the potential for the increased agency for players offered by Non-Fungible Token...