Play to earn games are the new video games genre that blends DeFi with entertainment to produce a new game genre that gives players the opportunity to earn money as they play. An increasing number of games and initiatives try to establish self-sustaining economies by feeding rewards that optimize the utility of NFT and tokens. The Play-to-Earn Economic Designs are crafted to make playing the game profitable and to raise the value of players’ previous work. Players will be able to earn money and see the value of their efforts increase over time.
Ryan De Taboada is Chief Operating Officer and Token Economist at Decentral Games, the company behind the ICE Poker community. Decentral Games released ICE Poker as a new opportunity for players to earn real money in Decentraland by completing daily objectives and competing against other players in a play-to-earn poker game.
While other play-to-earn games reward players with a gameplay token and then allow them to ‘breed’ more NFTs with that same token, ICE Poker players upgrade their NFTs with $ICE, and they don’t suffer from an exponentially increasing supply.
In addition, Decentralized Games is self-sufficient because it pays fees with rewards from the Polygon validator node it runs, the 1,000+ parcels of Decentraland LAND it sits on, and provides the liquidity for its own tokens. Community members vote on allocating these funds and tweaks to the token economics of the ICE Poker ecosystem.
“Of course, we didn’t invent Texas Hold ’em Poker! It’s a fun and skill-based game that millions of people already know how to play. We applied play-to-earn economics so that players can enter for free via delegation and play with Free Chips to compete and earn $ICE. We think it’s the most fun play-to-earn game out right now, and it’s also the only one live in the metaverse, so players enjoy an immersive 3D experience.” Ryan explains
Recently Decentral Games released field management tools that are comparable to what YGG and Merit Circle are trying to do around Axie. They take pride in being the first game to put delegation into the experience, such that they have a trustless splitting of that 70/30. However, the major challenge with Axies is that people are finding delegates to play for them for a month and then not paying them at the end. This is because Axies is a trust-based delegation, so the guilds are trying to solve it with a 10% fee.
Also, Ryan adds that they have built many guild management tools and delegation into the experience.
“I posted in the General for what this looks like, if you have many items and you’re trying to keep track of how your players are performing. And so we think that this, it protects players, it allows people managing their guild to see the data. To not spend a bunch of time like digging through on chain data, and will hopefully lead to better gameplay as it weeds out the people who are not playing as well.” Ryan elaborates.
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