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I see hype surrounding Play-to-Earn games (P2E) lately, just because it brings a new income stream to gamers. Many people are greedy, so they recur to blockchain-based games with the hopes of making big bucks in return. While P2E sounds promising, it's limited to the underlying blockchain network's capacity. I sometimes wonder what's the catch of games which "give away money for free", since fees on ETH are so high right now. How does the game generate revenue by itself? I suppose it's not out of thin air. We'll have to see how this will play out during an extended bearish market. Most probably, P2E will fail just like ICOs back in 2017.

Thoughts? ???

Personally I don't think that blockchain-games will fail. There are a lot of gamers who has playing computer games as a hobby so with the development of their logic and graphic, I think that there will be more and more gamers who want to play. As for money, usually, gamers earn money from other gamers when selling different things in games.

It's all about money. Those will never be interested to play the blockchain game if it's not about money. The hype that came to the blockchain gaming caused by the game being combined with play to earn and that let people to earn from playing the game. it's not only passively playing the game to earn nothing. that's only making us feel tired.


Lol that's wrong. Those play to earn game developers are also thinking about the cheapes and fastest blockchains to run their dapps. I have been actively playing axie and i got around $500 every month from playing this game but this totally depend with the price of SLP. it's too early to judge P2E will dead like icos. ICOs are not dead yet but it was getting evolved to the various kinds like IDO, IEO and many more.
So many people have been skeptical with shiba inu but that can enter into the top 10 CMC and surpassing so many bad old coins in the market.

Play to Earn games on Ethereum network can fail because the network requires too expensive transaction fee. Nowadays, projects can deployed and bridged to other blockchains in order to give users cheaper transaction fees.

Play to Earn, the name says it. Gamers can not spend $10 for a click when they play and even don't know they will win or lose after the click. Transaction fee on ETH network is painful for gamers.

I don't think Play to Earn will fail all. Some of them will keep existing on the market and growing more. Like Axie Infinity but they deploy their Ronin to resolve the expensive transaction fee issue.

Play to learn gaming on ETH is a pretty monopolistic application. Those who did not manage to fulfill the minimum conditions at a reasonable gas price more than a year ago, now there is absolutely no point in doing this right now. This is my personal opinion regarding web 3.0 games on the Ethereum blockchain. To do this, it is better to use a more user friendly blockchain. For example, Near Protocol develops a large number of gaming directions and taking into account its blockchain with low commissions, all in-game actions cost 0.01$ That allows you to develop your account very cheaply

Lol its not free money as it needs knowledge to win, time to learn and specially more time to spend in playing and investing at your characters and such. Its an ecosystem supported by its players and community investors where the money they got are due to their initial investments but with greater returns. Its like DeFi where you provide liquidity then you got compensated. In P2E, you provide time and money for your characters then you got compensated when you play. Its price are driven by market + in game features.

As I understand with the P2E NFTs, they're earning through commission of their own marketplaces. That makes them profitable if they have tons of players that are active from time to time.
That's why updates for these games will be never ending for them to retain their players and the commission that they'll get from their own marketplaces shall continue giving them their share since it remains active.

P2E is just a hype word promoted by those NFT & gaming companies. It lures youngsters who think "I can get rich from playing games." Just like gambling, you can win, but you can also lose money. It should be called risk games, money games, or soft gambling instead of play-to-earn ;D

However, even though the term P2E is a bit misleading, some games are rock solid playable games and you can actually make money (a bit contradictory with my previous statement tho). You know, you can call slots is a play-to-earn game as well, so this kind of games need 18+ and responsible gaming as well. It's not going to die like ICOs, but perhaps more regulated. Definitely not gonna successful with ETH, as it needs more capable network.

Anything that advertises easy cash and quick riches will always catch the eye of youngsters. How else do youngsters get clued to cryptocurrencies if not the hype in the quick ROI they promise. P2E is the rave of the moment and highlighting NTFs and Metaverse. It's a good one anyway, even when we take into consideration that one plays the game in relaxation to ease off stress and at the same time earn. However, I for one don't like any transaction that has to do with Ethereum because of the exorbitant fees in transactions. I won't be involved in any of such as it stands, to be honest.

Most companies will support cross-chain tokens, they use "Polygon" for the game but for any kind of trading activity they will use "ETH" since have more liquidity than a polygon network. The only problem of P2E ecosystem, the generating token they're make from the game and while the marketcap not growing follow the token minted there will be have so much sell pressure than buying presure.

I would say that there are a lot of play to earn games on ETH which looks like "easy cash, get rich quick" but the reality is that there are actually some of them manage to pull that off as well, which makes people look for others too. I mean look at Axie, I remember at one point you spent like 1k on 3 axies, decent ones as well, and then you earned like 600 bucks a month from that.

Obviously as it turns out if you spent 1k on it, maybe you would have made that for a month or two (which would mean you could break even at least) but the price of the Axies went down, the profit you could make also went down as well and now it is a lot less. So the catch is not that it is not working as intended, the catch is that it can't sustain like that forever, you need people to keep on breeding axies in order to spend SLP whereas if they do then the price of Axies goes down since there are more of them... it just doesn't work.

I think P2E will be one of the biggest trends on blockchain if not the biggest.
It will not fall in a bear market proof is that axie was going up in the worst conditions.
I see P2E only growing but not on ETH I'm more interested in Solana and P2E... we'll see how this plays out

You'll never know when the market goes on a bear. I'm into p2e NFTs but I'm aware of any possibilities that can happen to it and mostly the negative ones.
It's a craze that's setting its foundation and what if the actual known gaming companies are going to step in and will introduce their games having p2e feature? It would no longer be a hype I guess.

Never tried anyone of those, but I guess those "free money" is what is attracting the users towards it. How much do they actually earn? I am guessing just peanuts. I hope they realize  that they are wasting their time and can do something more productive and earn better. And I heard that you can only earn when you invest. I mean those who invests more, they earn even more. So risks are actually high. I have heard about a game (forgot the name) where users were able to buy lands in a virtual world and sell it for profit. Kind of makes no sense to me at all.

Most of the P2E games that are out in the market has some form of in-game transactions, just like your normal online game. They get their revenues from these in-game transactions, and that's basically it. Personally, I don't mind P2E games as long as they're enjoyable and not really scummy (like some random ass spyware being installed in your pc or something). I am playing such games myself, and so far I'm enjoying the grind and not really caring about the 'earning' aspect just yet until I hit the rankings.

Anything on the ETH network will fail miserably. There are NFT and P2E projects that are using the ETH network and for a while the users will be happy to spend high gas fees but there will be a end point when they end up loosing more money than they earn with those concepts, for example, some of the NFT that are available in the market, the gas fees is 10 times higher than the NFT itself and how a project will survive if they are not planning to move alternative coins.

Good P2E games will survive and it all depends upon which network the developers are choosing to built their game.

I think that it is definitely overhyped.

There is very little utility that you can bring out of a decentralized P2E game like Axie Infinity in my opinion, but with the current NFT hype it does make sense for people to play it.

Once this reward mechanism ceases to exist, I think that the projects in this space will die down. Just like a lot of the ICO projects back in 2017.

I think calling some of those people "greedy" is inappropriate. First, there are really people who are really into gaming regardless of P2E or not. The bonus is, while they enjoy gaming, it has rewards in return. Although some of them just joined the craze because it's play-to-earn, I can say that while in progress, they will actually love the game, not because of its P2E feature.


Most of the hype games are not using the ETH network. Some games are using their own blockchain or mostly, BSC networks.

But if we say, those games are within the ETH network, then users have no choice but to deal with ETH insane fees.

Definitely PlayToYearn games will fall when this hype is over. But now, when we see this euphoria everywhere and people are ready to invest anywhere without thinking - this scheme works perfectly. Don't think - just buy and invest more  :)

I know that Near Protocol invested $100M to develop #playtoearn games, and that in NEAR Network transactions cost <0.01$, and the speed is 2 seconds.  I wonder what will eventually come of this.  EVM Aurora was also launched on NEAR, and games that are launched on ETH, in theory, can be transferred to the NEAR network

Games on Blockchain are not the same as Games outside of Blockchain so they can require a lot of things like Graphics and others, because Games in Blockchain are only played to get tokens and Game characters in the form of cards which can be sold to those who like it so the price benchmark also uncertain.

I have the same feeling with all of this avalanche of many games using the P2E model. As of now, many are already falling in terms of coin prices and many have become a victim of their own circumstances. CryptoBlades is not anymore that profitable and many are leaving the game...am not so sure but I think the team behind is launching an extended gaming platform trying to get back to where it was months ago. The same is happening with the darling of P2E called as Axie Infinity though am crediting the dev team for doing all they can to balance things off. I "invested" money with PvU together with a friend and until now I failed to recoup the money I poured into it. Bad decision on my part.

The gamers who like playing new games, especially the games they like, will concern with the games and if they think that paying a high fee is worth enough to upgrade their equipment, they will do that.
I've seen that happen that many young people are playing those games and willing to use their money to upgrade their accounts.
If they do not want to pay a high fee gas, they can search for the other games that may be similar to the game they played but with a low fee gas to solve the gas fee problem.
But I do not follow any Play to Earn games on ETH or BSC or Matic so I do not know much details about that but I know that gamers have a passion for playing many new games.

For a game to be sustainable it has to have a sustainable in-game economy. Most of these games are just ponzi schemes which use the investments made by players to pump the in-game currency price, what means at some point it inevitably fails and every late investors lose money.

But if the game is good and entertaining it can work on long run, because there will be competitive players with legit interest for the game, especially those addicted players who desire to reach the top positions of the ranking. These players don't bother spending tons of money to boost their progress and have some advantage over their pairs. When it happens I think we could say competitive players feed farmers players who are there just for money, so the game becomes sustainable.

About ETH fees, well, that is easy to solve: just don't use it like many games are already doing right now.

Usually all play to earn game have network with BSC so far I know and never found with play to earn game using ERC or ETH coin network, maybe any one have new play to earn game and still early for playing? I am not really trusted with play to earn game have running more than one months except with AXIE game have much salary to buy hero character.

We kinda have the same thoughts.
Most of the play to earn games or NFT games doesn't seem to have a long term economic perspective injected to the game.
Unlike Axie who has a more competitive and possess a long term plans in terms of economic aspect.
I could've been invested more into the play to earn games that came out today, but I just don't want to trust their system more than Axie Infinity.

Catch is your time

if it is on the ethereum network it is not profitable. but it's different if in other networks that have cheaper transaction fees. it can generate income for those who play it. and I doubt that during a bear market, such games will fail. because as long as someone is still playing it, they can survive in a long bear market though. so the focus of P2E game developers is how they keep game users still playing.

Apart from tx fees and price volatility of the native/in-game token, that's the other catch especially for those who are just starting. It can become passive though because there are games like Axie which allows you to sponsor other players and do the daily grind for a share of the profit. Some game NFTs can be staked too.

I think this should have been given more emphasis in the OP. Each game economics is slightly different from others and you can usually find them written in the whitepaper.

In one game I know, the tokens used for creating a character goes to a reward pool and redistributed to players. The team doesn't really make money from that but it helps make the game sustainable.

yup i agree with you mate.. Because you know knowing that most of the source of income nowadays is through online games especially NFT'S since 2019, perhaps it's impossible to fail..indeed NFT's will not become most popular around the internet if such kind of blockchain games will not work good and can't guarantee good return from gamers after all.. So it has a very strong support now, and it will not fail and for sure there's a big improvement of blockchain games in the future because of that reason.

Well for project owners who ride the hype of NFT maybe we can see them prosper knowing that many people seeking for opportunity to earn online and this NFT is one of their option that's why many people invest on them. But for thinking that it will never be fail then somehow we should think according on what we see on the current trend where many rug pulls happening so expect about this so that you will not end up waking imagining your profit but in the end you get caught by scams and never retrieve back your money.

Blockchain games are on-trend these days but not all of them last and end up being successful because, to be honest, some gamers only want to take profit at the beginning which affects the whole gameplay. One of the common problems is balancing which is mostly caused by the oversupply of the farmed coins. If the developers would know how to control things appropriately, then the NFT could run in the long term.

Seeing the ridiculous amount on the scholars fee, damn I'd take a hard pass on that.

Play to earn games is not only in ethereum blockchain, lots of of NFT game developer is creating a cheap blockchain network like binance smart chain or BSC network, for me this the most cheap and not expensive network when it comes to P2E games lots of nft games is in a BSC network rightnow for example Cryptoblades, my defi pet, blockbank and cryptomines and so on.

"P2E" is just a catch phrase. Companies wisely use the term in order to attract as much people into their games. We cannot tell whenever this will be a success or a failure in the long run, since the trend is just starting to blossom. Personally, I don't think this will work, since Blockchain has scalability issues. Eventually, games running on scalable networks like Binance Smart Chain and Solana will become sluggish as blockchain transaction capacity hits its maximum. Games will perform better on a centralized server than a decentralized blockchain network. But as long as there's money to be made, nothing else matters. Regulations will probably come in, as governments want a piece of the pie. I wonder if blockchain-based games will require KYC after governments regulate them? That would defeat the whole purpose of crypto/Blockchain tech. We'll see how this will turn out in the long run. Just my thoughts ;D

I dont think play to earn on eth is like 2017 ICO, its totaly different situation. 2017 ICO is just the project with no use cases proven and NFT play to earn is the project wich can be counted and the use cases is there and real.

The growth of play-to-earn NFTs are unstoppable as of this point, so are those scammers. They mostly use Binance Smart Chain, Solana and Polygon network because of less transaction fees. ETH so far is very expensive and it will just lead to the devs moving to another blockchain.

It ends up shortly, that is what I thought. They are promoting P2E gaming platforms just to get attention and encourage gamers to play with them. This is obviously creating hype on the market as a strategy that is used to extract high demand giving way for the developers to gain profit from the said event. But, I don't think they will keep this becoming sustainable,and might have think that they will leave when they got reach their target already.

That's certainly true, mate. Competing smart contract platforms like Binance Smart Chain and Polygon will experience greater adoption over the long term due to their ultra-low fees and blazing-fast speeds. NFTs and Play-to-Earn games are usually built on these chains because of the many benefits they provide. How long will they last will greatly depend on mainstream adoption. A long-lasting bear market will put most blockchain-based games up to the test, as there's a chance they'll become unprofitable. It's up to game developers to increase the reward in order to avoid gamers from moving on to the next big thing in crypto. If rewards remain the same during a bearish market, then what use will Play-to-Earn games have? Just my opinion :)

I really can't say how the gamers will sustain any play 2 earn game in eth blockchain but in other less expensive blockchains like polygon and bsc I think both the dev and the gamers will both enjoy earning because the fees are relatively cheap,
Isn't the revenue use to sustain the games are already allocated from the supply pool of the projects! Plus there are some in-game items that are sold and this may probably go back into the pool, this is just my thinking.

Binance Smart Chain is no longer a chain that gives ultra low fee. It is lower than ERC-20 chain from Ethereum but it is no longer a chain for the poor. I used the poor because I want to remind the tweet from CZ. When he shilled BSC, he tweeted, Ethereum is for the rich and you will get poorer with ETH. BSC is for the poor and you will get richer with BSC.

Now BSC has more expensive gas price and very similar to ETH, CZ and Binance team can not handle it to bring the cheap fee back. It can come back if ETH and BNB price falls down and become cheaper. I don't think it is what we want. Fair enough, choose one in between: cheap fee or expensive price of ETH, BNB. I would like to choose the latter.

Polygon is promising and it is an alternative for developers to deploy their projects, games to it with bridges. It will help to save more transaction fee especially if you play blockchain games.

Saying it failed completely, of course not. Maybe it's more about the hype that could be when the price is getting deeper and deeper, it will only reduce the popularity of the game. It doesn't affect gamers too much. Because they will really take advantage of this to produce more tokens in large quantities at low prices. So that collecting them at bearish times will be much more dominant in welcoming price increases in the future. IMO, that's not too sure either, as we don't interact with P2P games very often.

There's a better use case for these NFTs than the ICO. Many have joined ICO and still many have joined the new craze for NFT. I think that assuming NFTs to fail is very normal when you've seen a massive hype and then the market starts to get crumpled later on due to the newbies that just invested without any proper knowledge. There were some use cases for the tokens that held ICO before and some of them are still alive until now. But it's just really different compared to the NFTs today.

It was never really "ultra cheap" considering there are free networks out there that people could use if they want to. The problem here is that we should not be looking for something that is free, as long as it is "cheap enough" then we should also look for the quality of the projects in it.

ETH is amazing when it comes to projects in their network, but it is incredibly expensive, literally costs 100 dollars to approve a swap pair for example, whereas SOL is great for fees since it is totally free most of the time or maybe like a few cents at the very worst case I believe, but when it comes to projects in their network they suck and there aren't any proper projects there, sure there are a few but they all feel subpar compared to ETH and BNB. So this is why people pick BSC, it is not the cheapest and it is not the best, but it is the best you could find for that price.

I do not think so. Metaverse will evolve over the coming years.
If we talk about conspiracy theories, then most people who will remain unemployed in the future will be able to find new jobs in the metaverse.
And in 3-5 years, very fast blockchains will appear that can operate at a speed of up to 1,000,000 transactions per second.

Well Facebook has been developed Libra since 2019 and they claim to launch 2020, but the fact is still on development and they change the name from Libra to Diem. There's also a claim it will launch on 2021, but as I see it just full of plan only.

To be honest, they're disappointed many people (including me) and I do not believe about the Metaverse can be used for primary money source. Probably only less people can achieve and success, but most of them wouldn't since it's worthless.

That's what happens when a blockchain network becomes too popular in the mainstream world. Fees begin to rise like crazy due to high network load. BSC is already experiencing these effects, and it should only be a matter of time before the same happens to other competing chains. I can't imagine how games would run efficiently on a blockchain, especially when network capacity is limited. They will bloat the underlying blockchain network, making it entirely useless. Unless scalability issues are solved, I don't see the concept of "Play-to-Earn" going anywhere. The hype will continue until a long-lasting bear market comes in. After that, everything might go down the drain.

What matters is crypto/Blockchain tech's decentralization. As long as decentralization is prioritized, nothing else matters. Just my thoughts ;D

Such eth-based games will not catch on, in my opinion, as long as the architecture of Ethereum is as it is. Currently, you pay $7-10 for a simple Eth transaction, and up to $50 for a smart contract transaction. How will dynamic blockchain-based gaming be possible? Makes no sense.

It is hidden fact from new blockchains with technologies that claim to be more advanced. They are younger, and have less users than older chains. Their price is lower than old altcoins. Combine such things, we have cheaper transaction fees on new blockchains but in future, things can be different.

We see how Ethereum network gave much cheaper transaction fee in 2017 when Bitcoin network was congested. A few months later, Ethereum network was seriously congested and its problems even can not be resolved until today.

Since 2020, we have Binance Smart Chain that gave us amazing cheap fee but now it is no longer cheap. Their team are struggling to scale up their network and bring cheap fee back. Will they succeed?

Fee is the most painful factor for Play-to-Earn gamers. They are not afford to spend $20 to $50 per day as in-game fees. If gamers leave because of fee, games will be dead.

Agree with you. People was mislead from technology to what they can earn from hype, FOMO and maniac period in crypto market. They are different and it is repeated each 4 years when the crypto market has more newbies join and only think of gambling with their capital.

Yes many got turned off on the ETH based games right now due to the huge network fee's deducted per transaction that's why there are so many shift to use other coin which has less fees like Wax,bnb and matic. Good thing for axie they create their own chain which require zero fee per transaction.

I do agree it make no sense for now so hopefully they address this issue since it really hurt to pay a huge amount just for a single transaction.