Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: Games pay to be played

Have you ever thought about earning money to play video games? This unlikely scenario a few years ago is a reality today.

There is increasing competition between so-called “play-to-earn” games. In them, players who dedicate their time to the game are remunerated in different ways, including NFTs and cryptocurrencies. There are reports in Brazil of people who left their jobs to become full-time gamers, living off the resources obtained on these platforms.

The model is the result of the fusion between the universe of games with the field of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, NFTs and the markets that have formed around these technologies. Many of the games available are free. However, in order to advance in the game and be more competitive, the player needs to invest time or money to gain experience, acquire weapons and other virtual items, and perform tasks to obtain scarce resources.

All this is also present in other games. The difference is that, in playto-earn games, ownership over these items is given to players, who can gather coveted resources, items or characters, converting them into cryptocurrencies that can then be exchanged for cash. There are multiple platforms competing for players today. Examples include “Axie Infinity”, “Thetan Arena” and the South Korean “Mir4”, which has been growing in Brazil. The latter encourages cooperation and the formation of groups (called clans) among players, since various objectives can only be achieved collectively. Some clans have hundreds of users.

What draws attention in this type of game is the amount of work they demand. In Mir4, to get money, you have to perform several tasks (including repetitive mining) in order to obtain a fictional ore. The game transforms the player into both an entrepreneur and a precarious worker, who needs to plan his time, costs, investments and collaboration/competition with other people to make a profit instead of losing as a result.

The play-to-earn model can be revealing about the current state not only of games but of internet platforms. Before him, it was even possible to earn money from games, but this only happened among an elite of players who turned professional and became celebrities, concentrating most of the possible revenue. Play-to-earn games, in turn, distribute the “cake” among a large number of players willing to attend (or rather, to work) within the platform.

The same model could be thought of with regard to social media. There are now countless users generating content for these platforms. However, as in games, only an elite generate income through the content they produce.

The play-to-earn model thus poses a challenge: what if it were possible to distribute the “cake” among most users? For example, paying users on a social network for “attendance” in the same way as if they were in a play-toearn game? Encouraging collaboration between users to get things done and rewarding a significant portion of them for their ongoing investment in “content generation”?

Perhaps the fusion of all types of internet platforms (and not just games) with cryptocurrencies is a revolution. Whether positive or not, we’ll see.

Thanks to Guilherme Vitorino for his contributions.

READER

It’s over Play and win nothing

Already Play-to-earn (get paid to play video games)

It’s coming Live-to-earn (get paid to perform life activities)