Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is the latest tech figure to echo the potential of crypto-based play-to-earn games. He predicts that in the next five years people will only play play-to-earn games.
"90% of people won't play a game unless their time is really valued," Ohanian said in an interview on the Where It Happens podcast, as quoted by Gamespot, Wednesday (19/1/2022).
"In five years, you're going to really value time right, and instead of being used for advertising, or being duped into dollars into buying silly hammers that don't really belong to you, you're going to be playing on-chain games. which is just as fun, but you will get value and you will be the ones to harvest," he continued.
Play-to-earn games typically use crypto tokens instead of the typical in-game currency. This means that gamers can exchange what they earn in the game for real currency in the real world.
One of the most popular play-to-earn games today is Axie Infinity. This game made by Sky Mavis looks like Pokemon Go at a glance, where players can buy pets called Axies and sell them for the cryptocurrency RONIN.
Gamers can also exchange in-game assets in the form of NFT. Currently, most of Axie Infinity's players are from the Philippines and in 2021 this game will become a source of income for many Filipinos.
But the economic system in the game Axie Infinity has found some problems. The Business Insider report claims that the profits that gamers get from this game are slowly starting to decrease because gamers choose to cash out rather than spend it in the game.
To play this game also requires a lot of capital. Gamers must purchase a minimum of three pets to participate which cost USD 100 each, so gamers must spend USD 300 just to start playing the game.
Besides Ohanian, several high-ranking game industry officials have also expressed their interest in the concept of play-to-earn games. Some of them are Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, EA CEO Andrew Wilson, and Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda.
