Two years ago, I started exploring the world of cryptogaming. It wasn't something I was really interested in at the time, and I sort of fell into this world by mistake. Since then, my feelings about cryptogaming in general have fluctuated wildly between believing that using the blockchain for gaming was the greatest invention since the wheel and thinking that crytogaming was the most predacious form of gambling ever to sink its claws into the human race.
Most games follow a basic wealth-building principle, whether they are physical games or digital games. It's a proven way to make your game enjoyable (or addictive) to the players, which keeps them coming back for more. In traditional games, you build wealth or level up as you play the game, but the wealth you build stays in the game and can't be utilized outside the game or by other players.
With cryptogaming, players can export the wealth they've built in the form of fungible tokens (FTs) or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can be sold on a marketplace for other players to use. This is an exciting development in gaming because it means that wealth created in a game that you are good at can now be converted to a currency that you can use to buy access to a new game that you want to try.
But there are drawbacks to this new concept in gaming. Wealth built in a traditional game has a fixed value to that game because it exists only in that game. But now that players can export the wealth from one game into a currency, the value of that game's wealth is subject to market pressures that apply to all games. In traditional games, players chose what and when to play based on how much they enjoy the game. Now, players decide which games to play and how much to play based on how much the wealth they accumulate in the game is worth outside the game.
These market pressures turn most cryptogames into miniature Ponzi schemes. In most cryptogames, you need to buy at least one NFT in order to play the game. As you play the game, you accumulate FTs or NFTs that can then be exported and sold on the market. Typically, there are a limited number of NFTs available to new players, but as those players play the game, some of the NFTs they produce can be sold to give others who want to play access to the game. This means that the earliest players control access to the game by other prospective players. Naturally, in the first wave of the game, the NFTs needed to play are rare, making them quite valuable on the market. The first wave of players can sell the NFTs they produce at a high price to others who want to play the game. And the high value of these NFTs make more and more people want to play the game, so they, too, can generate NFTs and make money. Like a Ponzi scheme, the earliest players make incredible returns on their investments from the money new players are pouring into the game. And like any Ponzi scheme, this can't last forever. Eventually, there are enough players in the game that the NFTs needed to play become plentiful and thus their value drops. As the value of the NFTs drop, fewer players want to play the game, and eventually, the whole thing collapses.
That is unfortunate, and it does make cryptogaming less fun in general. But now that these games are tied to real currency, people are losing real money by playing these games. You might argue that people are also making money, and that's true, but the average player is more likely to lose money than gain money. In addition, the fact that there is the potential to make money on these games adds a gambling element to the game. Gambling can be fun, but it can also be addictive. The Ponzi-like cycle most games go through combined with the gambling aspects of the games means cryptogames can easily become exploitative, even if that is not what the developers wanted.
The drop in value of game assets has become quite predictable, and if you don't get in on the early rounds of these games, your chance of making money playing cryptogames is very low. In reality, even if you get in on the early rounds of a new game, unless you can afford to buy enough assets to truly dominate the market, you are more likely to lose money than make it because it's not playing the game that makes you money, it's playing the market. If you just want to play the game, you will probably lose money in the long run.
That would be fine if the games were fun to play in their own right, but most cryptogames are built on the concept of being able to build in-game wealth that you can export into currency. Very few are enjoyable enough to play that players would want to play them even if they didn't make any money. And if they are fun to play even if you don't make money, there's still a desire to continually buy more assets so you can play even more or at a higher level, so you end up spending more money on the game than you initially intended.
That being said, I do still feel that there is tremendous value in being able to export wealth from one game and convert it to something that can be used in another game. I just think it's going to take some time for the right game to come along that can find the right balance to allow wealth to flow between games effectively.
So, when you combine the bad taste I have from my experience actually playing these games with the hope that I have for their future, I am left feeling...meh...about the whole concept.
