Play-to-earn Economy Market Overview
Last updated
Last updated
Gamers often played games purely for the fun of it before the invention of the play-to-earn model. There are records of gamers who would spend countless hours playing games. However, such passionate interest must either be terminated or drastically reduced to engage in exchange for a more financially rewarding endeavour.
The thesis of play-to-earn is to make gaming a career path dedicated gamers can thread and be financially established. If anyone would like to play games for fun, why not make it possible for them to earn with it while they do so?
After all, gaming companies are making financial rewards from these games. Thus, play-to-earn is creating an ecosystem where the financial rewards of gaming can flow through every party involved in it, including the players.
However, the traditional gaming industry was not ideal for such a model, and Web3 has been shown to provide a better technological stack and community. Since the launch of CryptoKitties to Axie Infinity and beyond, the Web3 gaming economy has received widespread—albeit gradual—adoption over the last few years.
The traditional gaming market has seen the unique value of play-to-earn and has changed its stance regarding adoption and investment. Investors such as Serena Capital, Tiger Global, and Animoca brands have joined the league of investors backing P2E startups.
Similarly, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Disney, and other major video game companies have also been testing the waters of play-to-earn and finding their feet. Over the years, there have been major improvements in the global and grassroots adoption of play-to-earn even though the attempts of market penetration have not been as easy as it looks.
Popular P2E games such as Gods Unchained, Arc8, crypto: The Game, Star Atlas and lots more have been available on AppStore and PlayStore. This connotes that the market of P2E has expanded beyond the crypto natives to normies.
On this note, it is important to highlight how incredible P2E has been in onboarding many people and new markets into the Web3 industry. Research confirms that most people have first-hand experience of Web3 in three major ways: meme coins, NFTs, and games.
Notably, P2E has amplified NFT and Metaverse with prominent projects such as Decentraland and SandBox, which were topping the list of to-be-played games globally. Of course, objects and characters in the Web3 gaming narratives exist as NFTs and the settings are seldom in the metaverse.
This created a composable catalyzation of the NFT and Metaverse markets as gamers were buying assets and providing more liquidity on-chain. It pushed the wave of the Metaverse so hard that FaceBook, a billion-dollar social media company, changed its name to Meta as a testament of the realignment of its vision.
Of course, the industry has took its fair share of the bear market blow. According to a Defiant report, Yield Guild Games allegedly experienced around 70% fall in revenues. Other Web3 gaming projects died completely, while majority managed to escape the bear.
Fortunately, the bear market was a time to reset, restrategize, and iterate on feedback to build what people want. Post-bear market, the quality of Web3 games improved, teams were more dedicated, and players had better gaming experience than before.
shows that the P2E market was worth about $755 million as at 2021 and it is predicted to increase by 21% by 2031. speculate that the market should have trapped in over $600 billion worth of valuation by 2030.