How Can We Earn From Crypto Games?
It is difficult to tell the difference between boldness and recklessness. Same goes for greed and ambition. Likewise with being a contrarian and being wrong. How much would you pay for the potentiality of a virtual asset? Would you even pay a single cent on something (1) virtual and (2) has yet to exist with limited factors to determine if your investment is gonna be worth it?
A reasonable man would say no.
However, people who are into crypto games are buying up virtual assets that has yet to be released into the game. Here is the best part: some of the games are not even operational at this point in time, yet their virtual assets has already been sniped up by players (gamblers?). Land gameplay is still in the making and has yet to be released in Axie Infinity. However, the lowest price of each piece of land costs onwards of 4 ETH. At this point in time, it means that each piece of virtual land costs an estimate of $12,000 USD. If you were to glimpse through the marketplace of Mirandus by Gala Games, you’ll witness the same phenomenon too. Players are paying a significant amount of money to cash in on opportunity. If the game turns out to be good, chances are the prices of their virtual assets will increase exponentially
If the game turns out to be bad, your virtual assets are gonna be worth less than a dime.
I believe all behaviour makes sense with enough information. If we were to take the time and effort to sit down with people whom we call insane, we might just get it. We may not understand them immediately, but at least we’re listening to their life experiences of which few are visible to the outside world. Maybe we’re the ones who are stupid, or blind, or uninformed. If you could own a piece of land that consistently spits out interest for you, wouldn’t you want to own it? Does it matter if what you own is a physical or a virtual land? Apparently, it didn’t matter to someone we had decided to buy and merge 64 parcels of land together on Decentraland and combined them into a single estate. Being in a prime location in the game, Estate 331 or commonly known as “The Secrets of Satoshis Tea Garden” was sold for 1,299,999 MANA which was close to $81,000 USD at the time it was sold. Fast forward two years later, 1,299,999 MANA is now worth more than a million dollars.
What makes this real life story even more exciting is in its cryptic message being attached to the estate that states: The Secret to Freedom is Courage.
It is transformative for the games studio as they no longer need to reach out to platforms like Kickstarter. They are getting near-infinite runway by preselling (land) NFTs with a much better risk-reward ratio where players supplying the money take all the risk. Some NFTs will have the potential to make their owners a lot of money, especially the ones that allow the owner to receive dividends from all the activities happening within a plot of pre-sale land.
But what if the game developers decide to collect back the plot of land due to its immense value?
The advent of NFTs has allowed in-game items to be verifiably traded, sold or given from player to player. Once an item is in your possession, it is yours to use, trade or sell as you please. The common term being used is immutable. Ownership of these in-game items are immutable, which means you possess the NFTs, not the companies that create them. No one can take it away from you, and that includes the game developers. In essence, if you’re buying an in-game NFT, you’re banking that the game will have some form of longevity. I believe it is fair to say that many crypto games will fail, not due to any crypto-specific reason, but due to the very nature of games. Many games, be it crypto-related or not, will fail simply because they aren’t fun. If the game isn’t good, people aren’t gonna stick around. Making great games should be the number one priority followed by a good crypto technology such as easy-to-use secured wallets, no transaction fees, decentralized marketplace and the list goes on. If the game is fun, the money will come.
