The slow but sure rise of Web3 has given birth to the concept of “play-to-earn” games that integrate with blockchain to provide players with ownership of their gaming assets and the ability to get paid for doing what they love best.
But despite some initial success, notably during the height of the COVID pandemic when some people claimed to be making enough money to pay their living costs simply by playing games, Web3 game titles remain something of a niche product, with very few real video games players embracing them.
You might not be able to make any money playing popular video games like Grand Theft Auto, Ghost Recon and Fortnite, but most players don’t actually care about this. The reason they play games is because they want to have fun, and that appears to be something that Web3 games developers have forgotten about in their rush to bring blockchain gaming to the fore.
Games like Axie Infinity and CryptoKitties both enjoyed a comparative degree of success, creating strong communities around their games, making headlines around the world. They were early showcases of how blockchain can be used to create unique digital assets from NFTs. These NFTs represent in-game assets, like characters, skins, weapons and accessories, that players can own and trade freely with one another. Blockchain also supports the creation of tokens, or in-game currencies that players can earn as rewards for winning battles and progressing through the game, enabling them to monetize their time and effort.
Too Much Web3 Is Never A Good Thing
The idea of getting paid for playing games is intriguing and it was undoubtedly the reason why Axie Infinity became so popular circa 2021, with some players reporting that they could earn hundreds of dollars per week. However, it was also the reason why Axie Infinity failed. Ultimately, the in-game economy proved itself to be unsustainable, as it was reliant on a continual flow of new players entering the game to provide capital for existing players to earn. The gameplay itself was seen as repetitive and boring, and with the ever-dwindling profits being the only real incentive for people to keep playing, it struggled to keep adding them.
When Axie fell by the wayside, a new generation of crypto games emerged that have focused on improving the gameplay and making the experience more enjoyable.
Star Atlas billed itself as the first AAA play-to-earn game, with its awe-inspiring graphics and an enormous gaming universe that one player alone could never hope to explore. As a space-based MMORPG exploration, trading and mining game, Star Atlas aimed to merge blockchain with real-time graphics, immersive gameplay and DeFi-like mechanics. Its stunning visuals were enabled by Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite system, creating an expansive universe of truly alien worlds ripe for territorial conquest and expansion.
In Start Atlas, players are tasked with flying around and exploring the universe, discovering new planets and exploiting them for resources. They can trade with other players, create alliances, declare war on others, become a pirate and attack traders, make money from mining and more besides. It’s a truly open-ended experience.
As ambitious as the game is, it has struggled to match the success of Web2-based MMORPG games, but the reason for its failure is not because the gameplay is lacking. Rather, Star Atlas seems to have put too much focus on its Web3 elements.
To become successful in Star Atlas and compete with the best, players have little choice but to immerse themselves in the DeFi aspects of the game. Star Atlas’s economy is heavily focused on the idea of lending, where players either need to borrow money to get started in the game by purchasing essential resources, or make money by lending it out to keep up with the profitability of their rivals.
The key to making money in Star Atlas is to become an expert in yield farming, which involves identifying assets to borrow at lower yields, then trading and lending them out at higher yields to make money on the spread. Of course, to negotiate these markets one needs the skills of a DeFi trader or an economist, and managing these investments quickly becomes a major headache, distracting the player from the actual fun aspects of the game.
Just like Axie Infinity, Star Atlas was guilty of putting too much emphasis on the Web3 aspects of the game. Whereas Axie was singularly focused on making money by winning repetitive battles over and over, Star Atlas became more of a trading experience, where users found themselves immersed in financial markets in a struggle to make enough money to compete against their richer rivals. Neither game put much emphasis on having fun.
This kind of experience can quickly alienate the traditional gamer, especially casual gamers who simply want to pick up and play for 20 minutes of fun before they get back to work or class or go and hang out with their friends.
Gameplay Must Come First
For Web3 games to succeed, developers need to realize that, first and foremost, most players want a game that’s fun, making it enjoyable to play, and they want an experience that’s addictive, so they keep coming back for more. The secret for success is to focus on the game first, make sure it’s fun and engaging so they have a foundation of captivating gameplay that can be enhanced with Web3 functionality.
In other words, Web3 needs to be more of an add-on rather than the main focus of the experience, and it’s something that very few blockchain games have done to date.
However, there are signs that some developers are beginning to get the balance right. The new mobile game Drift Zone: Arena is fast gaining popularity on Telegram, where it’s available to play as a mini-app that doesn’t even need to be downloaded. It takes advantage of Telegram’s integration with the TON blockchain to give players access to a ready-made wallet they can use to store their DT tokens that are central to the game’s economy.
Drift Zone: Arena is a card-based battle game, where players collect “Drifters”, which represent different characters they can use to fight against other players in auto-battles, with the outcome determined by the attributes of each one. Players compete in one-on-one, player-vs-player battles to earn coins and climb the ranks of the leaderboard.
There’s a lot of emphasis on strategy, as players can use the coins they earn to upgrade their Drifters or even merge them together to create even more powerful and advanced Drifters with more lethal attributes, leaving lots of room for experimentation. As players progress through the 18 available levels, they face new challenges and earn different rewards along the way. Progressing through the levels is not as simple as it looks, though, for players will not only need to accumulate enough coins, but also prove themselves out on the battleground.
Drift Zone: Arena’s secret is that most players won’t even realize that they’re playing a crypto game. The DT tokens they earn from winning battles are a bona fide cryptocurrency that can be bought and sold on crypto exchanges, but players won’t realize this unless they specifically research it to find out for themselves. That’s because the developers of the game only ever emphasize the gameplay itself.
It can be thought of as a kind of “stealth blockchain game” that’s easy to access and fun, with exciting gameplay and unpredictable rewards on offer. Players don’t need to know anything about blockchain or crypto to play the game, the only thing they’ll know is that they’ll enjoy playing it.
By focusing on elevating the gameplay experience, developers of Web3 games can succeed where those who went before they failed to make a long lasting impact. If a game is to enjoy any kind of longevity, it needs to provide a polished and engaging gameplay experience that’s accessible to every kind of player, and not just the crypto natives.
With Web3 games, the rewards should never be the reason for playing the game. Only when people are playing blockchain games for fun will the concept start to take off.
