There has been a lot of hype, drama, and FUD around blockchain gaming for most of 2021 and 2022 so far. As a result of this I think many people are hyper-focused on the earnings potential of these games, which is awkward.
When I do my blockchain gaming live streams, people often come in and ask about the earnings. It’s common to get questions about the future of the cryptocurrency, or about if now is a good time to invest into a certain game.
Why Do We Use Blockchain?
I understand and appreciate the value of investing… a very good thing to do.
But it is always hard to answer these questions because I did not get into blockchain or the web3 gaming scene as an investor or a flipper… I got in there as an artist.
Back when I started blogging on the blockchain-based blog platform Hive, the first thing I did was post drumming videos, not talk about tokenomics.
What people should play blockchain games for imo is mostly not about earnings, it is about owning their assets.
Simple enough concept, gamers should be able to own their digital assets that they spend thousands of hours grinding for. It doesn’t make sense for Activision-Blizzard or any other centralized company to retain ownership of rare and valuable items in time-consuming games.
The most obvious example of this is games like Hearthstone… people spent so much money on Hearthstone and never owned anything. It seems so weird in retrospect.
People Who Use Blockchain for Life
It’s a lot more sustainable to onboard people into games like Axie Infinity, Splinterlands, Gods Unchained, or anything else based on the idea of asset ownership and not any kind of play2earn model.
Asset ownership is a real foundation, a first principle that answers the question of why we should have blockchain technology in games. Earning is good, but much more complicated. In games with millions of casual players AND competitive players, how many get to earn? How much do they earn?
We’ve seen many games struggle with this in late 2021 and 2022 so far, especially Axie.
Yet the core fanbase of Axie in particular has largely stuck with the game, despite much complaining and drama around tokenomics. Why?
No Alternative to Digital Asset Ownership
Well, for all the FUD of people hating on blockchain games like Axie, they have nowhere else to go.
They realize now that to not own your own digital assets is a bad thing.
No matter how fancy the game, if it isn’t blockchain, it might as well be Mario Bros. 1 now.
So even if somebody is mad that the investing or playing to earn did not work as well as they hoped… even if the token prices aren’t as high as they wanted… what else do they do? They can play a different blockchain game, but they will have a hard time going back to the old way of not owning anything.
So even though the play2earn fades, the player remains.
Because we were never here for playing to earn. We just like to earn when we can. We are really here for the digital asset ownership.
