Do you hate your job? What if you could make money playing games instead? That’s been the siren song of professional sports for the past 150-plus years; if you’re good enough, and enough people care about the game you’re playing, there’s life-changing money to be made out there.
That applies to online gaming as well. But in this world, you don’t necessarily have to be one of the elite players out there – you just have to put in the volume. I remember briefly trying to chase down Supernova Elite status on PokerStars back in the day, and let me tell you: Never in my life did a game feel more like work.
Ah, but with online poker, you still have to be, at worst, only slightly below break-even if you want to stay afloat and take advantage of those volume-based rewards. What about these Play-to-Earn (P2E) games that are taking the crypto news by storm? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Let’s investigate.
What Are Play-to-Earn Games?
It’s right there on the tin: You play the game, you earn stuff. We’re not talking about Esports competitions like the Overwatch Champions Series, where the players have team contracts; this is more like an extension of regular everyday gaming, except instead of receiving yellow moons or green clovers or whatever when you unlock an achievement, you get something of monetary value.
When we talk about P2E in the crypto gaming world, we’re usually talking NFTs. Non-Fungible Tokens can be video game characters as well as Bored Apes and tickets to the NBA All-Star Game. Whatever kind of game you’re into, there’s something out there for you, everything from first-person shooters to animal breeding. Grind these games long enough, and you’ll receive a healthy pile of crypto for your efforts.
Did You Say “Animal Breeding”?
Why yes, yes I did. Axie Infinity (by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis) is a game on the Ethereum blockchain where you collect Axies, which look sort of like axolotls. Axie Infinity Shards/Token ($AXS) is the primary token you earn for playing the game, in which you collect, breed and raise your Axies before sending them to battle.
This isn’t all that different from Tamagotchi, really – or CryptoKitties, the pioneer blockchain game released in 2017 by Canadian studio Dapper Labs, where you buy, breed and trade cat NFTs. Except there isn’t any P2E in those games. People who made money off CryptoKitties before it died down did so by flipping their cats, which you can also do with your Axies when they’re not fighting it out.
What’s the Catch?
Indeed. Firstly, Play-to-Earn is also known as Pay-to-Play-to-Earn, since you are often charged at the beginning to sign up. According to a February 2020 report from Sky Mavis, the average starting cost for an Axie Infinity player was US$400 – although it might be one-tenth that today, given how the post-pandemic crash erased about 90% of the value of NFTs as a whole.
If you are willing to pay the start-up cost and grind it out, you can expect to make the equivalent of… checks notes… US$10-50 per day if you’re playing Axie Infinity. That’s not much – unless you’re living in a country with a lower standard of living like the Philippines, where an entire ecosystem of “gaming guilds” sprung up around Axie Infinity like small towns during the Klondike Gold Rush. It’s mostly tumbleweeds now.
Fortunately, there are other ways to collect crypto while playing P2E games. You can stake or lend your crypto, you can buy up virtual land and charge others rent or admission fees – you can even participate in community-building events at the company level. But that’s work, not play. And just like pro sports or online poker or any other game you play for a living, unless you’re at the very top of the food chain, there are much easier ways to make a lot more money.
