There are lots of reasons why people play video games. Relaxing is the most common one, using games to unwind at the end of a long day the way people do with television shows or movies or music. Gaming can also conjure feelings of joy or wonder or hope, as they do for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:that sad man in the Zelda advert. Video games encourage our cre𒈔ative side, they act as a stress relief, they can wrap us up in stories. Few, if any, do it to make money. Because of this misguided reasoning, the idea of play-to-earn was doomed from the start and is a deeply soulless endeavour.
The rise and grind mindset has already infected most hobbies, and you could argue gaming is no different. Streaming can be a rewarding pastime that eventually grows into a career, and some will feel obliged to monetise their hobby in this way rather than feeling naturally drawn to the merging of social performance and gameplay that comes with streaming. There’s also esports, where the most adept players compete for cash and glory, and likely wouldn't take their training so seriously if rewards were not on the line.
Both of these are very different from play-to-earn, however. With streaming, those involved already love the games they play, and 🎀presumably like the art of communication that comes with streaming itself. Even if the second part is forced by the rise and grinders 🔥trying to milk money from every second of their lives, it all begins with a love for video games themselves. Likewise, esports pros only get to the level they are at because there is a spark in them that loves the games themselves. The monetary reward might cause them to play again and again and again until the fun is drained, replaced by the fuel of competition, but it all began with love. Play-to-earn games have no love, and will never get off the ground.
Of course, play-to-earn games sound good in principle. I'd love to get money every time I played a video game. I'd love money every time I slept or walked or ate or breathed too. But a golden rule in life is that you don't get money unless you're making it for someone else. Twitch streamers make more revenue for Twitch than they do themselves. Esports contests generate more money than they give out in prize funds. Your job, whatever it is, makes more money for your boss or your boss' boss or your boss' boss' boss than it does for you. And here's where play-to-earn's inconvenient loophole comes in - you aren't actually making money at all.
Instead, the idea is that you'll earn digital assets - NFTs or some other crypto thing - which cost the game-makers next to nothing to generate, but which have a monetary value. You buy or grind out a skin for a gun or a building on a map or an ape avatar to play as, and then other people buy it off you for more money, making massive profits. Why? Well, that's a question that never gets answered. Axie Infinity is the biggest road test this idea has had, and it was an unmitigated di♕saste🎀r even before it was subject to a massive hack.
Take a game like FIFA 23. It has an in-game marketplace where cards of arbitrary value are sold for inflated sums, but what you are play-to-earning is Disney Dollars. You earn Coins which you can then spend in the game, keeping the revenue flowing, while customers (that's how the game sees you, not players) put in real cash to get FIFA Points, which can be used to open loot boxes for more players, which you can sell for more Coins, etc. etc.. Any attempt to actually play-to-earn, to sell Coins across accounts for real-world money, is clamped down upon quickly. Companies only want you to sell when they can take a slice of the profits too.
The biggest issue is that nobody wants to earn what these games propose. Crypto currency is well behind schedule on its planned market penetration, the NFT wave is over before it ever really crashed on our shores, and few games can command the type of at🔜tention required for this success in the first place. If making a game everyone wanted to play was easy, they’d all do it. Square Enix didn’t make Babylon’s Fall for a laugh because it didn’t really want anyone to play it. There is no love, no soul in these games, and that will doom them before you even get to the stupid play-to-earn idea. Add in that the idea really is monumentally stupid, and you have a concept that will never get off the ground.