There are hundreds if not thousands of play2earn and crypto style games currently on the market. However only a few really make it on top as becoming leaders while many others die out. What is it that keeps a game rising to the top and staying there compared to one that just never gets traction or doesn’t hold it’s fame?
While the obvious are reasons such as lack of continued development, lack of listening to the community and lack of simply caring or too small of a team so not marketing efforts are all reasons for a game to never take off or to simply die out and fail.
When looking for a new game to play in the play2earn space I look for two core components now.
Free To Join At First or Low Entry
A game that’s free to join and take part in is going to attract a lot more player base than one that doesn’t. The biggest example of this would be the wax game Alien Worlds. Let's be honest not much has gone on with this game but the fact that you can start from nothing and build something was one of the biggest aspects of it’s adoption.
Other games which have an upfront cost of $10-$50 seem to do rather well too. This is because the general gaming community is used to paying these smaller price tags to play a game. This is why this low entry price tag works well and we see this being used in Splinterlands. This $10 getting started package gets them some basic cards to start playing with and get a feel for the game. With another $20-$40 you could either rent your deck or buy some lower end cards and actually rank half decently in daily quests and seasons.
This low to no barrier to entry is key to the success of a game for attracting new players on a massive scale.
No Fees Or Fees Collected on Trades
Running a game on a feeless blockchain such as the HIVE blockchain just makes sense. Your players do not want to be sitting there and paying for every microtransaction they do 3 cents here and 3 cents there might not seem like much but it’s an annoying nag that just takes away from the fun of the game.
Instead resource focused blockchains such as Hive and Wax make sense. Pay for the crypto or earn the crypto and power it up allowing you to use resources on the chain. This now allows me to interact with the game with no more annoying errors or trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Even better is when a game takes your $10 buy-in for the game and allocates resources to you so you can use the game fully without even knowing it! Now that’s some seriously awesome onboarding.
Because there’s no fees involved or real buy in price the big question comes up.
How do the developers make money for the game for living costs, profits and marketing?
The answer to that comes in market fees. You see, every wax sale the owner creates a set % fee for every transaction of their NFTs. For example if someone sells a 100wax NFT 5 wax goes to the company. I don’t think Hive has any marketplace like this currently setup but even a 1% fee could honestly mean millions for the platform to grow off of, offer up as rewards to investors and so forth.
One of the biggest sales Splinterlands had on wax was something like a $700,000 land claim. 5% of a market cap on that would have given the Splinterlands team $35,000 worth in wax! Not bad for a single transaction.
What makes the ultimate play2earn game?
In my opinion it’s a combination of free to join with the option of low cost entry (starter packs $10-$30) and collecting a small fee for every transaction that takes place of the in-game assets while allowing the gamer to fully use the platform without any resource issues.
What are you thoughts?