In today’s Web3TV video, we’re with Rami James from ultra.io and we’re going to discuss play to earn gaming and whether it is worth your time and money.

The Problems With Play To Earn Gaming

According to Rami, play to earn gaming at its core is pretty problematic because you’re talking about ah a lot of people that are investing a lot of their time to generate what is for them really low amounts of value. That value is migrated to the publishers or developers of those games and the people that have money in the space.

What is currently happening is people have to spend a lot of money on NFTs to begin their play to earn experience. This then limits the scope of the number of players who will actually play those games because there are not that many people in the world that are willing to drop one thousand dollars to play a game.

From a wider pr perspective, it doesn’t look good for the Web3 gaming space because it looks like people are being leveraged in a way which is not positive and at the end of the day it doesn’t bring joy, it doesn’t bring a good play experience and it doesn’t bring value to the people that want to play.

In Rami’s opinion, when you talk about play to earn gaming today, the markets that are developed are very insular and not that interesting, so those markets each game you’ll have either one or multiple sets of NFTs which are minted by the platform by the developer and then those are used to gate access to the game.

So for example with Axie Infinity, you have to buy a bunch of their different players to be able to play in the game for a set, the price of those players are pushed up by the limited number so it’s kind of like a fake market that isn’t a real representation of the value of the individual character.

It’s just lots of people wanted to play so they didn’t mint that many and to be able to get access you have to pay a lot which means that the people that bought in early if they knew that they were supposed to buy in early bought way more than they were supposed to and then they sell it on the market and that’s just not fun, especially if you’re just interested in exploring and interested in playing. That’s not a fun play experience now.

How Do You Make Blockchain Gaming A Fun Experience For A Wider Audience?

According to Rami, for wider mainstream adoption, you want people from outside the Web3 gaming space to look in and be like ‘hey that’s cool, I want to be part of that’.

There has to be a shift in mentality from the developer or the publisher perspective in what’s appropriate to be developed and that will be largely guided by the market.

People are still enamoured with the idea that they can sell NFTs for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. However, the mindshift needs to be if your price point to play the game is around twenty to thirty bucks and purchasing the game includes a license and access to any of the NFTs that you might need for gated access to special features.

NFTs should be given away for free because the most valuable thing that you can have is a player that is going to continue playing and when you want a player to continue playing the best way to do that is to build a relationship of loyalty between you and them.  So you say ‘Here, I’m gonna give you access to cool stuff, it’s not going to be in the very beginning, it’ll be through you entering a contest’. Or it could be ‘Here’s an airdrop where you’ve been playing for a month and as a reward here’s access to new functionality’.

All this can be gated through NFTs to reward your best players because you know that at the end of the day you want them to keep playing and recommend it to their friends. This provides a much better experience than selling an NFT for a thousand bucks.

What Is an example of your ideal Web3 experience?

Rami would like to see versions of web2 gaming experiences which are expanded through NFT technology or blockchain technology.

For example, let’s say you have a basic a farming game where you exist in a small world and you do your thing, you build your farm. You can now in Web3 have this experience in a massive multiplayer game where you as a farmer could farm carrots and then go to an open market and sell those carrots. Other players buy those carrots because they need those carrots to make say carrot salad or whatever in the game and there’s this ecosystem of coordination which happens through NFTs.

Blockchain gaming should be about extended functionality for the play experience which is already valuable for the users. You then just bolt on extra fun stuff that they can do because the technology allows it.

Rami feels this is also a great way to educate people on how to do business through gamification such as in the farm scenario he just gave.

Is there a platform currently available that allows for this type of Web3 gameplay?

A lot of these concepts and technologies are really new that have only emerged in the last like six to twelve months.

There’s some technological barriers that we’ve talked about in a previous episode but I think that those difficulties are largely behind us and if not than they will be in the next year or so.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on what type of game you’d like to see developed using Web3 technology. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

We’d also love to invite you to watch all episodes of Web3TV where we share inspiring stories of all things web 3.0 at www.web3tv.com.au/watch

Connect with us on our Social Media Pages below: