Bringing digital identity, assets, and ownership into players’ hand...

Introduction

If individuals are to allocate significant time, attention, and personal investments to digital environments, establishing their belief in the durability of their digital presence and items—as well as their economic robustness—is vital. Early implementations have shown that blockchain technology is particularly suited toward achieving digital trust, as this can ensure decentralized storage and tracking of digital value.

Blockchain technology is already being implemented in other sectors, including finance, culture, and education, and video games are no exception. Play-to-play games use blockchain technology, including nonfungible tokens (or NFTs), to create the value and ecosystem with the game. An NFT, in its most basic form, is a manually secured claim to a piece of unique data that can be transferred between digital locations. NFTs can take the form of characters, terrain, virtual currencies, or other decorating components.

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Changing Publisher Dynamics

The real value behind digital items is their decentralized security and integrity, which very closely parallels the unfettered decentralization of publisher or state controls. Instead of depending on the limitations or authorizations of publishers or other parties, in-game items from play-to-earn games can be freely sold both on and off the game platform.

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Evening the Playing Field

Recently, countless communities worldwide have drastically come forth to expose the concept of play-to-earn gaming, showing how it is progressively altering the dynamics of an economy. Most notably, a game called ''Axie Infinity'' displays why this is more than just a pipe dream. The popular play-to-earn environment, which advanced from 4,000 to 2 million daily active users within a few months, has become especially popular in the Philippines and Venezuela. For individuals residing in the Global South, their earning potential online is significantly more than what their physical economy offers.

In addition, the ancillary platforms such as Yield Guild Games Scholarship Program, which brings players in emerging markets to participate in play-to-earn games, has attracted some of the largest investment groups and thus are worth billions of dollars in a short period, overshadowing many of the most popular video games in value. By mobilizing the market for game-based NFTs in this way, mobile games and their connected platforms constitute frictionless economic opportunity and meritocratic market participation between geographies. It's 2021, and the planet looks increasingly flat.

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Playing the Waiting Game

Don't forget that Play to Earn games do not by definition and fully alleviate the centralization found in games. They still require the publisher's support to delineate, recognize, and restrain the asset that ultimately becomes a NFT. The most significant promise of play-to-earn games is their ability to decentralize markets to create, own, and exchange digital assets and their potential through these connections to improve the futures of both crypto and fiat money. Players can choose to transform their digital time and expenditure into actual cash through the physical world.

Pursuing and investing in core parts of these new worlds can garner great financial rewards to those who saw them coming; many will be from the emerging markets who acted on the advantages right away.

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There are risks involved

The pay-to-earn model may present an exciting new way to earn financial stability for players themselves. But the model also reflects the general prevalence of digital platforms, which tend to transition jobs into humans as a service, which entails substantial social risk. Limited job security, challenging relationships between firms and employers, and a scarcity of social support systems are prevalent in the freelance marketplace. Freelancers are already significantly overrepresented in the creative field, so policymakers and others must take these considerations into account.

Conclusion

Though play-to-earn is the new kid on the block, it could redefine more facets of life than only the gaming industry. I believe that it has the potential to redefine how people interact with and perceive traditional socioeconomic structures such as financial institutions, markets, and governments. Shown is the proof that play-to-earn video games provide proof of concept of a self-sovereign financial system, an open entrepreneur economy, universal digital representation, and ownership that are easily accessible by different electronic environments and avenues for creating value.

Bringing digital identity, assets, and ownership into players’ hands through play to earn games