Play to Earn is one of the central visions of Blockchain Gaming and it very well might be its most promising concept. Since in the blockchain world digital assets are truly owned by the players it's very much possible to earn actual money while playing. Or at least that's how it could be in theory. Truth be told, there are still a lot of questions to be answered and problems to be solved before Play to Earn can become reality. In this article I'm going to discuss the basic concept of Play to Earn and explain why this isn't really working for most games (so far) and offer some ideas on how to fix those problems.

1. The Vision

It's a pattern most gamers will be all too familiar with: You find a new game that you really enjoy, you keep playing compassionately for many hours until it finally served its purpose and you abruptly stop playing it. Not considering those all time favorites you keep coming back to every now and then most of those games will never be touched again. Looking at the economic side of things this can be translated to spending X amount of money for Y hours of entertainment. In the mainstream gaming world that's all there is and since we are used to it we are mostly fine with the status quo.

Play to Earn aims at changing that exact status quo by adding a third variable to the equation. Instead of only getting Y hours of entertainment you could also earn Z amount of money by playing the game. The idea is simple really - the stuff you do and the items you acquire ingame are stored on the blockchain and transferred into your very own possession. So once you decide to no longer play a game instead of leaving everything you achieved behind you could first sell the most valuable parts you gathered. Or even better, you could keep selling stuff you find ingame but don't personally need and thus turn a profit while playing or, like the title suggests, you could play to earn.

This is a concept that really resonates well with me as it's something that reminds me of the days of my youth where the money I made playing Friday Night Magic payed for the Saturday nights out with my friends. It's also something that could help make gaming more affordable for those on a tight budget as paying those 50$ is a lot easier to rationalize if you know that you can get 40$ back after you finished playing the game.

As amazing as all this might sound we sadly still have a long way to go until this can become reality and that's exactly what we are going to talk about next.

2. What's holding it back

Play to Earn is not exactly a new concept although it usually wasn't called that way. Different games on and off the blockchain have tried to stimulate a secondary market where players could and should trade their ingame assets. Selling CS:GO skins is one of the examples where a secondary market actually is successful while Valves infamous Artifact is a recent example where such an endeavor failed horribly. Anyway we have yet to see a really successful game where players truly own their ingame assets and are allowed to trade them freely. That's due to several reasons:

2.1. It's simply not working for a lot of games

This is a pretty obvious reason but still it's worth to take note. Owning and selling ingame assets only makes sense for certain kinds of games. In most single player games there's just nothing you'd want to buy from another player. If you play a 1st person shooter or a real time strategy game you get the most entertainment if you simply play the game from start to finish. If you were to buy late game items, waypoints or anything else you'd just deprive yourself from a portion of that entertainment. Generally speaking, games that are about telling a story and/or that have an actual ending won't work well with any form of ingame trading. That's not to say that single player games generally can't be play to earn but they need to be open ended and offer a consistent world in order to make it work. Anyway, multiplayer games are the obvious candidates to become a play to earn title so we'll focus on what's holding them back especially.

2.2. If someone wants to earn, someone has to pay

Fun enough, a lot of developers (but also a lot of authors here on publish0x and elsewhere) seem to ignore that simple fact. "Everybody earns" is something that's not working and that never will work. If anybody claims that everybody will make money doing something then they are either knowingly lying or simply naive. For every dollar a player earns somebody else has to pay a dollar. Now that somebody can either be another player or it could be the game (company) as well. The problem with the latter is that games obviously shouldn't be paying more than they earn (at least not over an extended period of time). So they'll either pay so little that it's simply a waste of time or so much that it's not sustainable.

Hex TCG is a great example how it's not meant to be done: Hex is a trading card game that's pretty close to Magic the Gathering (Hasbro actually sued them because of that) and for a while it seemed like they where really on to something. They allowed you to trade your ingame cards for currency, they had new sets regularly and they did cash tournaments every week. In fact they had a tournament every Sunday with a cash prize pool of 1,000$. To play in the tournament you had to pay an entry fee but a) you could use ingame currency and b) they never had enough players show up for any of the tournaments. So effectively they were giving out cash that they didn't make in the first place, ultimately leading to the games downfall.

As this example illustrates it's a thin line for a company to give out real money themselves. Consequentially it's preferable to have the money come from your players or only pay in your ingame currency and then have your players sell that currency to each other.

2.3. Players have to want to spend money

So ultimately, in order for players to earn while playing, other players will have to spend while playing. At first this might sound like a bad thing but it really is not. To those on a tight budget it offers the chance to play at a discount or even make some money while playing while those with a bigger budget can freely acquire ingame assets they are interested in. Obviously, the latter will need some form of incentive to actually spend their money. This is where many games already fail to deliver resulting in hordes of players trying to grind their moneys worth out of the game. Since nobody is there to buy their stuff they'll get frustrated eventually and the game dies.

Next we have those games where the driving factor behind all money spent is the hope to make even more money down the road. It's amazing to see how many players actually believe that this is a concept that can work in the long run. I already mentioned Upland in my last article and I can't stress this enough: Games like that aren't even games in the first place but simply pyramid schemes with some gamification attached. All you do in those games is invest money into stuff and hope that someone even more stupid will come around and pay you more money than you had to pay before. This is not how pay to earn works, at least not if you're not one of the few early adapters that got in early enough and managed to turn their profit before everything goes south.

In my opinion the only way to make people want to spend money is by making a game that's enjoyable and that can become even more enjoyable if  you invest some extra money. Again, this might sound easier in theory than it is in practice. Basically there are two major pitfalls developers need to consider:

2.4. Make the game enjoyable without spending money & Don't make it Pay 2 Win

The former is really challenging to do. If your game is not enjoyable without actually spending additional money nobody will want to sell anything because nobody will play it in the first place. At the same time you can't have spending money be completely pointless. If you can't get anything out of spending money there really is no point in doing so. In this case you'll have a lot of active players looking to sell their stuff but almost nobody actually buying it.

Developers often try to incentivize additional spending by giving paying players an actual advantage in their game. This is fine and probably one of the best ways to make people buy assets from other players (besides selling cosmetics) but at the same time this is a very dangerous thing to do. If the advantages of spending money are so huge that you don't stand any chance without spending money you'll lose the sellers as they'll get smacked around by the buyers all the time. Have the impact be too small and the buyers will stop buying again.

3. Conclusion

As those last points show it is all about balance. The game needs to be good without spending additional money but spending that money needs to have enough of an impact to justify it. I absolutely believe that pay to earn can work and that it's going to be one of the main selling points of blockchain games. While there are some games that seem to be heading in the right direction we have yet to see a blockchain game that really gets it just right and I'm curious how the final form of pay to earn will look like.

In future articles I'm going to take a look at both Splinterlands and Gods Unchained as the currently leading trading card games in the crypto world and discuss how pay to earn is working for them so far.

Once more, thank you all for reading and see you next time.