Digital games and the metaverse make natural partners. Now a new wave of play-to-earn (P2E) games is making an impact on Web 3.0, allowing players to earn money by buying and selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Put simply, fungible means interchangeable. Currencies, including cryptocurrencies, are fungible; if you’ve seen one bitcoin, you’ve seen them all. NFTs, by contrast, are unique digital assets.
Blockchain, a record of crypto transactions linked in a peer-to-peer network, allowed gaming companies to generate $476 million in revenue in the first half of 2021. P2E, as a new arena, could ultimately be worth as much as blockchain.
Here are four new P2E games making a splash in the metaverse:
Axie Infinity
In this blockchain-based game, players can earn NFTs from cute monsters, then pit their monsters against each other in battles, as well as buying, selling, and trading resources they earn. Axie Infinity players transacted almost $3.5 billion worth of NFTs in 2021, close to two-thirds of all the NFTs in blockchain gaming that year.
DeFi Kingdoms
Despite still being under development, this platform already offers opportunities for players and brands. It’s the biggest GameFi project on the Harmony One blockchain, with over $350 million in crypto assets. Its nostalgic fantasy pixel-art game environment has gardens that players and investors can ‘farm’, and a marketplace where they can trade tokens and buy or sell in-game items.
Elfin Kingdom
One of the top games on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is Elfin Kingdom, an RPG where players can mine and collect NFTs, connect with other players, and go on adventures to capture Pokemon-like characters called Elfins, earning tokens and rewards.
By allowing players to run a virtual business in a small town with farming, harvesting, banking, and factory processing functions, the game combines the best applications of decentralised finance (DeFi), a form of finance that uses smart contracts on a blockchain to cut out intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, and banks.
Galaxy Fight Club
Galaxy Fight Club is a real-time Player versus Player (PvP) game that brings together different NFT collections on one platform, where users can log in and fight as their NFT characters. It’s a cross-gaming platform that spans different intellectual properties in the metaverse and allows them to interact.
All these innovations are seriously disrupting digital gaming. The rise of play-to-earn in the metaverse looks set to transform the industry both for gamers and for brands.