The term “Play to Earn” was coined from the fact that players of a game can get paid to play a game. Play to earn is a model that is prevalent in the blockchain industry where players of a game are rewarded with crypto or blockchain based assets. Unlike traditional games, the rewards from these games have a real world value attached to them. Traditional games had in game rewards only valuable inside the game and cannot actually be used in the real world.
Players are incentivized to play the game more as they will be rewarded with more crypto assets that have real world value. Or at least can be flipped for fiat currency easily. Play to earn games are attractive to many players as the not only offer entertainment but also the possibility of making money. However, most play to earn games are stingy in nature as the rewards will be little to nothing and will require a player to spend significant hours in order to make a decent income.
Most people instinctively know this but their main motivation to stick around is potentially ,the possibility of the value of the crypto they gain from the game could possibly go up in the future and they could get rich from a game they played a few years ago or even months if they are lucky.
Play to earn games can either have a native cryptocurrency in them such as the ones listed below in the picture from Coinmarketcap:
Examples of Play-To-Earn games with a native cryptocurrency include the popular Decentraland with MANA as its in game cryptocurrency and Sandbox with SAND. You can check their current market price here.
Other play to earn games use established Crytocurrencies such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, dogcoin or cardano. Bitcoin Pop and Bitcoin Tycoon are example of games that use Bitcoin as their in game currency.
The Economics of Play to Earn Games.
For a play to earn game to maximize on their profits. A player of the game needs to be trading the games assets to external users and thus encourage more players to play the game. This will increase the amount of collective time spent on playing the game and thus revenue from ads would increase.
The game assets could be coins or NFTs which developers of the game would benefit from as they move from player to player.
