When you look into the gaming industry, you will accept that in-game purchases of items, tools, or weapons are a popular concept, and players have accepted them totally as a norm. This concept is known as microtransactions, and they have become a part of free-to-play games. With this, players buy virtual items to unlock new levels or enhance the function of their characters in the game.
But the blockchain technology is disrupting the gaming space and introducing new gaming models. With blockchain technology, play-to-earn video games emerge daily and become famous. Likewise, innovative services are reducing the entry cost for players.
And this innovation is creating a path to establish the real vision of Metaverse.
A New Way to Earn as You Play
Modern video games are well associated with microtransactions. These in-game purchases vary from accessories and costumes to more complex offers such as characters and weapons. As a result, the gaming community has different sects within it. But the right engaging mentality can make them offer fair-price new content or manipulations to a pay-to-win gaming mentality. This resulted from game abuse.
This may result in personally created pay barriers to the success of some players who cannot employ their money to purchase things within the game they bought already. Likewise, continuing a game or moving to the next level will make a player lose any specific title earned with payments.
But we are experiencing a new era of “play-to-earn” schemes in the video game industry due to the massive adoption and development occurring in the blockchain-based gaming space and the non-fungible token (NFT) community. With this, the whole scheme is modeled on absolute asset ownership in the industry. A significant example is Axie Infinity.
Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn online game with the emerging NFT reward model. This NFT-based online game is the leading decentralized application (DApp) in the Ethereum blockchain space. This revolution happening in the gaming industry is regarded as “GameFi.”
The idea behind the GameFi concept interprets that gamers should instead have their money as investments in digital asset resources instead of just spending their money on non-rewarding in-game content. As such, those digital assets will increase in value and can be sold to another exciting market.
This income generation model from the online game is a result of NFT technology. With the underlying blockchain technology, gamers can make real-world currency associated with digital currencies. Due to this, we have a new digital economy that rewards users’ engagement with financial services that can be lucrative to receive exciting offers.
Innovative In-Game Subscription Model
It is essential to acknowledge that money is required to make more money. But these NFT-based games are changing the narratives with their value creation scheme while having a “buy-in” price. A “buy-in” price is an initial payment required for a gamer to obtain a unit of an NFT or a token. This model is essential to establish the play-to-earn mechanism.
Despite the emerging promises of this new development, there is a stumbling block similar to the “pay-to-win” game model. Due to the inability of newcomers to spend meaningfully on in-game purchases while engaging the game, we may experience another era of the “pay-to-win” model.
A prominent example is the Axie Infinity game. This game, modeled after the Pokémon gaming style, presents gamers with difficulties to earn tangible rewards for playing. As with the case of this game, a new user needs to obtain a minimum of three virtual creatures before they can begin to play.
Whereas these virtual items have a minimum purchase price of $70 on the marketplace. This sums to a total of $210 as a starter for newcomers. Meanwhile, that might be expensive for interested gamers looking to be involved in this innovative game.
On the other hand, there is some good news for extended engagement from guilds’ games such as Yield Guild Games. This game is creating innovative ways for extensive engagement from everyone interested. And one of those ways is lending assets—such as Axie—to new players for a percentage of their profits.
This translates to individuals with less money sources having access to the game and others with enough capital to make passive income. With this illustration, we clearly explain an achievable Metaverse that boosts the virtual economy within players and enables absolute inclusion for the Metaverse that everyone is looking forward to the experience.
Blockchain and Metaverse Intersection with the Game Industry
Hearing the term “Metaverse” for the first time may sound complex and confusing. But it is a term describing the big concept related to compounding digital services and digital worlds while being interconnected and interoperable. As a result of its ambition to connect the new digital world, struggling traditional platforms are working towards adaptability to become compatible.
The icing on the cake is how blockchain makes this easier than preconceived. With NFTs and other decentralized assets, you can successfully transfer your assets across multiple networks without stress in as much as they are attached to a blockchain. Meanwhile, the general digital currencies utilized in this regard will become the widespread virtual cash you can use for future services.
This will cause a revolution in the gaming industry, and it will specifically base on gamers’ interaction in cyberspace. As such, they are building an innovative functioning economy that is primarily spread across the digital world.
This will lead to creating a new ecosystem with actual benefits to worldwide users wherein individuals earn as they explore the entertainment world. This will come majorly from a single access point made by the Metaverse. And it will lead to the removal of barriers that dictate value creation and transfer.
Optimization Is a Needed Tool
While all these may sound exciting as a form of empowerment and lucrativeness, there is a need for blockchain developers to optimize the whole network for this functionality. This means that they should balance the kinds of available items for purchase, enhance players’ experience and their interactions with games or other markets.
If such optimization is not done, we could still have blockchain to address the development’s pay-to-win issue fundamentally. However, one way to address this is ensuring that newcomers cannot buy their way up to some ranks. They have to earn it by playing and unlocking some items associated with specific levels. And they must not be able to skip each level.
Ultimately, we can agree that blockchain and NFT ecosystems create the new model gamers expect via the Metaverse. Although the development is taking a slow path, developers are noting details to ensure that the whole process is optimized. Just in time, we will have the number one “killer app.” However, lagging companies will have to catch up with the innovations.
