Comment by PragmaticPulp
4 years ago
> I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation.
Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value?
Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money into the system to cash out old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.
Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing. As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some people will happily pay to experience that content immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more normal.
EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased using real money and then used as a substitute for the monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-making schemes that let them avoid paying anything to play - each month they'd just exchange some small fraction of their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.
Point being, I think there can be a value to these things outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across. From the start, the developers have always seemed more interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their players than they have in making enjoyable games.
> It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.
It works more or less the same, but now with an expanded F2P option that provides access to only early ships / skills (and some other limits). The PLEX is now used to pay for an account to have full access to the game for a month.
Well really it's that you pay for Skill Points now, because a subscription is almost free if you extract and sell the skill points earned.
Allowing RMT would ruin the economy because as a small guy I can generate $1050 in profit per month if you convert 500 Plex to cash at $20, although the black market rate is closer to $7. If I could generate real money then I would play more than 1 hour a day, I would probably quadruple my industrial operation and then everything is massively inflated in price locking out casual players from the gameplay they want, and the margins on a lot of items would decrease meaning you have to make up for it in volume, except a casual player isn't going to be running 30 accounts.