In Web3, ownership can eclipse the popularity of Play-to-Earn

If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to the blockchain gaming space, you’re already familiar with a three-letter word that has come to define this growing gaming sector in recent years: play-to-earn. The world first heard about play-to-earn (P2E) games thanks to Axie Infinity, the massive blockchain game that aimed to reward players with real money in return for their time and effort.

But it’s been five long years since Axie first appeared on the radars of the terminal online. Today, the game is still reeling from a massive $615 million dollar hack, and the recent crypto downturn compounded by reports of near-exploits by some players has led to an ever-shrinking player base.

Despite these setbacks, blockchain game developers believe the space is still open for a new industry titan to emerge. And it will not offer players games with explicit messages about games to make money. Echoing the sentiments of Brazilian game developer Mark Venturelli, there is a growing belief in the blockchain gaming sector that play-to-earn mechanics actually have no place in games.

So what will take its place? Play-to-own game. Instead of offering players financial rewards as incentives to play, it is believed that giving players real ownership of their in-game rewards, items and characters is the way forward.

When blockchain integration goes wrong

On the ground, the play-to-earn model has left many players around the world holding the bag. When games are shut down and their community support wanes over time, players who have poured hundreds of hours into those games are left with nothing but wasted time and worthless collectibles. For example, when F1 Delta Time – one of the oldest existing NFT games on the market – was unceremoniously shut down in April 2022 due to licensing issues, the owners of their licensed NFT cars suddenly found their utility gone. At least you can play with Hot Wheels. Without games around them, these NFT cars became useless.

But looking at F1 Delta Time from an optimistic perspective, it is difficult to place all the blame on the developers. Licensing is a tricky business, even more so in games that hope to serve as ongoing live service platforms years after release. Unfortunately, you could do a lot worse than building an entire platform and in-game economy on a licensed product in terms of stability. The founders of NFT Worlds took it further Minecraft using an (albeit sophisticated) mod system. Now they have to do what their more successful modern Decentraland did – actually build a game.

Fortunately, things are moving fast in Web3 – and it looks like blockchain game developers are ready to try new things. While the NFT space as a whole rightly remains skeptical of Pixelmon’s tentative second attempt at life after the massive backlash faced after its first coin, the controversial project’s new leadership has shown some understanding of the broader blockchain gaming space. For example, this second time around, Pixelmon’s new leadership seems acutely aware of the increasingly negative optics associated with games for money. Instead, it has shifted towards something many developers in the space believe wholeheartedly: play-to-own.

Blockchain developers are shifting away from P2E

But what does ownership have to do with gaming? According to WAX’s Chief Gaming Officer Michael Rubinelli, that’s all. WAX has established itself as a veritable hub for Web3 gaming, becoming a thought leader in the space. In an interview with nft now, Rubinelli was deeply critical of the play-to-earn game model, calling it a “failed miserable experiment.” Like Venturelli, Rubinelli believes that introducing the possibility of making real-world money into a game inevitably causes it to become a player’s main focus while playing the game. Instead of having fun, you know.

“When you have ‘served’ in the title of a movement, that is its singular focus,” he said. “Like everyone else, all I’m going to care about is the ‘earning’ part of it, right? And in that regard, you’re going to attract people who only care about profit or revenue. It’s really harmful for [blockchain gaming] motion. It’s super painful. It’s terrible, it’s cancerous, it’s toxic. And no surprise, it’s doomed to fail, and anything modeled after it is going to fail too.”

But where does the defiance against games to make money come from? For starters, that’s what bad actors can do when they start playing in a game to make money. “Every project craters. There’s carpet pulling. There’s terrible things that happen because they’re built by people who are hard and mostly focused on profit for themselves, and maybe a little bit for the players. [The players that do profit do so] in an unsustainable [and] unhealthy way and it creates all this scar tissue and all this backlash and it will never work,” he said.

The worst offenders, Rubinelli argues, are developers who don’t even bother trying to make their games fun, instead focusing their marketing on integrating blockchain technology, even in the title. “You have to start with the game. It must be fun to play. If the game isn’t fun, what’s the point? Like “I hate this, but I’m doing it anyway.” Well, that sounds like a job to me. It doesn’t sound like a video game. Sounds like a video work,” he said.

A model that works

According to Rubinelli, ownership has been a concept familiar to players for generations. The mainstream gaming industry just hasn’t caught up yet. Somehow. Speaking about WAX’s latest title Blockchain Brawlers, Rubinelli highlighted the pedigree of one of its key developers and the impact his past work has had on pop culture at large.

“Dude, it’s a game designed by [Magic: the Gathering creator] Richard Garfield. IN [Magic], 22 billion cards have been traded since 1995 from player to player. Let’s start with that premise, he said. Instead of blatantly modeling this upcoming title to entice players with promises of financial gain, WAX has instead set up a system that has been proven to work for decades. “When you win things and when you lose things, it is your own things that you want to lose. So when you lose it, you can win it back, he said.

Other developers in the space have bigger ideas for what owning might entail. Don Norbury, Head of Studio for upcoming Web3 first-person shooter (FPS) title. Splinters, believes blockchain technology could enable players to unlock deeper levels of in-game storytelling. Placing players in a damaged near future where an asteroid collision causes titular shrapnel to rain down on Earth, players must compete against each other in an attempt to collect scarce resources.

“We think it’s important to have strong world-building – to have your own theme and aesthetic that people can relate to and then start building their own story within,” Norbury said in an interview with nft now. “We’re not making a sandbox-style game where you can make everything under the sun. You will create things that are in Splinters universe. […] Our goal and our vision, when we see the longer term. is society effectively taking over [the game.]”

Specifically, Norbury hopes this upcoming title will offer players that level of expression through in-game map creation. Like the very popular Forge mode found in Hello series, Norbury hopes players will take full advantage of the tools Splinters want to give. “There is a tipping point where most of the cards that are played [will be] user created. We think it will happen very quickly. [Eventually,] our seasonal updates and sample content [will] just be a blip on the radar. That’s how we know we’ve succeeded in doing our job, he said.

A million-dollar idea

But what happens when an in-game map enters Splinters going viral? What if one of the players happens to create the next industry-defining gaming genre? They will own it – and will have fewer barriers to cross to bring it into the mainstream. Both Norbury and Rubinelli have shown a great understanding of this possibility, since some of the most played games in the world started as mods of popular games.

Counterattack — basically a Half life mod — spawned a new breed of ultra-competitive fast-paced FPS titles. PUBG — which started as one ARMA 2 mod — was the first great battle royale shooter. However, one game may surpass all others in approaching Norbury’s vision for Splinters: DOTA 2.

Currently one of the most played games on Steam, DOTA 2 began as a mod of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. It recreated real-time strategy gaming, integrated it with stat-based role-playing mechanics, and was designed as a purely competitive effort. But what made it so revolutionary – and in line with Splinters goal as a title – was how it did all of this while giving millions of players a way to engage more deeply with Warcraft characters and lore.

Through the game-to-own game paradigm, ideas can finally take center stage, ahead of the promise of in-game rewards. “For us, a true healthy self-sustaining economy requires deeper societal commitment and value. And a lot of that for us is the content [players make] which bubbles up to the top. It is also super valuable input from the community. So when we say production effort, we don’t just mean people making maps for example. We mean actual valuable things that are done by society Splinters the universe,” Norbury said.