Gaming has come a long way since the first ancestors of humans gave their children toys to play with. This has gradually grown from being items children play with to being an adult pastime too. It has evolved from the physical to the analog, then digital and now we have immersive gaming in the form of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Metaverse integrated gaming.
Similarly, the definition of gaming for both the player and the audience has also been evolving. There are game streaming websites where people play games, and people pay money to watch them. This provides money both for the players and the companies that own the platform they play.
This evolution of the gaming experience has come around, and now, we have a new form of gaming called Play to Earn (P2E). This type of gaming rewards the players for the time they spend playing. This gaming type is not a very new model of gaming as there have been several games that offer rewards to players, but those were not popular, and its reward model was not focused on the player.
These characteristics have made people question the very concept of the Play to Earn and what it is really about. If you are questioning or want to understand what it is about, this article is for you.
Gaming Generations
To understand what Play to Earn is about, let us look at gaming development. Gaming has come a long way. The evolution of games falls into three stages or generations.
The first generation of games offers a one-dimensional type of gaming experience. The player buys the games pre-installed into the consoles. The consoles do not accept any other form of games apart from those pre-installed. Some of the games of this era include Pong by Atari and Magnavox Odessey.
The period witnessed the development of games by single programmers, but the success of the Atari games led to the boom and development of the gaming industry. If one gets tired of playing games in this era, the gaming and the consoles are useless, making playing games have a considerable cost both before and after playing.
The second generation of gaming saw the first development of consoles that can play multiple games from different developers. These gave the players enough gaming power as they could switch between other games without the consoles going obsolete and becoming useless. This reduces the cost of the layer.
However, a player can still lose the money invested in the gaming once they get tired of the game. These include the games such as Zork, Space Invaders, and most types of games that we are familiar with.
The next generation of games was the third generation, which did not require anything from the player except the ability to download and play the games. However, some of them offer the players more power if they could buy in-game applications and attributes. Freedom means that there is a low barrier to entry for most players. The games run mainly on computers and mobile devices. They are known as Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Games.
In the period intersecting the first and the second generation of games, the first idea of Play to Earn came out. This idea seeks to reward the players for their time. Some of these Play to Earn ideas reward the players by streaming the games to viewers worldwide and sharing part of the revenue with them. Others offer one other type of reward to the players, and it is mainly in the form of in-game rewards that cannot be translated into external or physical rewards.
However, the advent of the Blockchain, NFTs and Metaverse and the integration with finance through Defi has led to a new form of Play to Earn that actively sees the player as a participant and rewards them in different ways.
What is Play to Earn Gaming
In most Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Games, the player has various reward systems. The rewards can be earned or bought from the game. The idea is that the basis of Play to Earn as developers code unique reward items which can be transferred within and even outside the game. This is called Gamefi technology, and it is made possible through Blockchain.
These rewards can be tangibles such as NFTs or tokens. These NFTs or tokens can be transferred to a wallet and sold in the secondary market like Opensea or exchanged for coins. Some of these games include Axie Infinity, where players mint NFTs called Axis, which can be sold in the secondary market. These run on the Ethereum blockchain.
Other NFTs run on different blockchains too.
In the Play to Earn model, the players share out of the reward that comes from playing the game. In other gaming models, the whole revenue goes to developers and owners of the game. However, Play to Earn shares the profit from playing the game between the player and the game developers.
So the player has as much stake in the game as the developer. One important point to note is that while streaming rewards players who are experts, the blockchain-backed Play to Earn rewards any player based on their time and effort. So there is democratization which is consistent with the goal of the crypto economy. The ability to create opportunities for many people, and this time, the model is doing this through gaming.
How to Join Play to Earn Gaming
Joining Play to Earn gaming can be like joining other games. You have to determine what factors you look out for in the Play to Earn game that you are trying to enter. Are you looking for those that reward with NFTs, tokens, and in some cases, both. You also have to determine whether you want the game to allow staking where you have to use some coins to earn more or just reward yourself without you putting anything down.
When that is determined, you look out for games that match your need and join. Joining most games requires you to create an account and add a wallet. Then you play. Some games offer a reward for the time spent on the game, others for the success in playing, while others need the player to do some work before getting the reward.
In all, joining Play to Earn gaming is easy. One needs to find the ones that suit the intended needs and play away.
Conclusion
The evolution of gaming has a long history, and many changes are being made to it daily. However, the introduction of Blockchain and its promise to change how we interact with technology has also added a new layer to gaming - the Play to Earn later.
Play to Earn rewards the player who participates in the game with some reward. These rewards can be tokens, coins, or both. These rewards could be for the time spent playing or completing a task. .
Play to Earn games have a low barrier of entry as one could connect his wallets and start playing. This makes it so easy for anyone to join and earn the rewards.
