Comment by Zaskoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zaskoda | Hacker News Reader

I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way.

In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum.

Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many others is that many others only slightly deviated from the CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8, came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot.

I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public trade the currency as they wish.

I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model.

Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.

P2E F2P and P2W are more loose buckets than categories with hard and fast distinctions.

I don't think that P2E is inherently bad. Indeed, the history of RMT in games that try to prohibit it (WoW, Eve, etc) shows that P2E is a mechanic that is hard to avoid in certain types of grindy mmo games.

What makes Axies a pyramid scheme is not the incorporation of P2E mechanics directly into the game, but that the game requires players to "buy-in" to the economy to start playing and tries to incentivize that initial purchase by promising later earning capacity.

> I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation.

Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value?

Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money into the system to cash out old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.

Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing. As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some people will happily pay to experience that content immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more normal.

EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased using real money and then used as a substitute for the monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-making schemes that let them avoid paying anything to play - each month they'd just exchange some small fraction of their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.

Point being, I think there can be a value to these things outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across. From the start, the developers have always seemed more interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their players than they have in making enjoyable games.

> It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.

It works more or less the same, but now with an expanded F2P option that provides access to only early ships / skills (and some other limits). The PLEX is now used to pay for an account to have full access to the game for a month.

Well really it's that you pay for Skill Points now, because a subscription is almost free if you extract and sell the skill points earned.

Allowing RMT would ruin the economy because as a small guy I can generate $1050 in profit per month if you convert 500 Plex to cash at $20, although the black market rate is closer to $7. If I could generate real money then I would play more than 1 hour a day, I would probably quadruple my industrial operation and then everything is massively inflated in price locking out casual players from the gameplay they want, and the margins on a lot of items would decrease meaning you have to make up for it in volume, except a casual player isn't going to be running 30 accounts.

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