Is Play-To-Earn Dumb or Poorly Executed?

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Play-to-Earn model vs execution struggles

Last week we got Pirate Nation’s co-founder and product lead, Adam Fern, giving his take on Play-to-Earn (P2E) and how it deforms the relationship between game and player. In his view, “P2E takes two value systems, fun and finance, and forces them into the same room. What you get isn’t synthesis. It’s sabotage”

He is drawing his conclusions from his experience of implementing such a mechanic in Pirate Nation. That is why the team ultimately decided to halt token emissions completely. Adam believes that rewarding players in any shape or form is a no-go, as he clarified in the comments of his article.

On the other hand, this week, Fableborne’s founder (a mobile ARPG), Kam Punia, expressed that it’s not the P2E model itself, but the execution that has been lacking. He argues that real money gaming and financialization isn’t a new concept and has already proven quite successful, 

“Financialised rewards are also not a new idea. Real money gaming has proven it can work at a massive scale”.

The examples that he listed are Mobile Premier League (MPL) in India and Skillz in the US.

The pain points he finds are the over-financialization of rewards and that earning hasn’t been just a part, but the entire experience. As he put it,

“The best games have always had many layered incentives - mastery, progression, social play, and even economic layers that reward some players based on what they achieved. 

The key here is NOT all players can be rewarded with all the incentives. Not every player can max their hero, open every chest, unlock legendary loot. Yet we saw teams allow every player to earn.”

There is merit in both opinions.
Real-money gaming is a truly big part of the gaming industry, and it has shown that financial incentives have a place in gaming. Most recently, TapNation announced that a collaboration with Unique Network which rewarded players of Color Water Sort with their token, saw an 89% increase in Ad Revenue and a 16% increase in player sessions [Read more about it in our previous write up].

Despite that, Adam’s point remains and as he accurately put it, “teams have tried every possible tokenomics design/sink mechanic under the sun and none have worked over time”.

Not only that, but also efforts to reward players differently based on their spending, play time etc. have all fallen into the void.

So, if it is poor execution, what needs to change? Why have well funded and experienced teams repeatedly failed despite extensive experimentation? Granted, a very large percentage of studios were copying already failed recipes, and there are quite a few still experimenting, but it feels like we should have seen more progress. Don’t forget, for every 9 studios that were poorly repeating the same token designs, there was a 10th, like Pixels that heavily experimented to turn their P2E model sustainable, but ultimately, at least until now, wasn’t able to succeed.

If the whole concept is invalid, then how did giants like Mobile Premier League and Skillz get built in traditional gaming? We are not talking about casino games here (at least not only casino games), but mostly card and tabletop games.
Hike Gaming is attempting to build what Mobile Premier League did but in web3. Hike is a Massive Multiplayer Online PvP gaming platform. They recently announced they processed $80m in Gameplay Volume.

Perhaps the differentiator between those successful web2 giants and P2E is the use of a gaming token with volatile value instead of $. Perhaps it’s the emphasis on wagering on skill-based games, not earning without risking anything. Perhaps not all games are built for financial incentives, although we see in TapNation’s case that it was a hypercasual single-player game, not exactly the game type one would imagine.

🎮 More Gaming & Web3 Stories

• Aquarium Quest is a new game about breeding fish in your own pixelated aquarium. [Read more here]

• Kingdom Story: Heroes War is a mobile RPG that migrated to Ronin. [Read more here]

• Star Atlas launched their new shooter mode in the Epic Store [Read more here]

• Sleepagotchi is doing a mobile launch preview on iOS and Android [Read more here]

• vPixel, the first AppToken of the Pixels ecosystem is now live on Ronin [Read more here]

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