Gaming Guilds and the Future of Play-2-Earn
Play-2-Earn is since the NFT craze a known buzzword to many but have you heard of gaming guilds? The biggest gaming guild has a market cap of approx. $300 M at the time of writing and there are many more of those but what are they really?
Traditional gamers are very familiar with this term but only recently have gaming guilds made their way into the crypto sphere. A gaming guild is a collection or a group of gamers that organize to play video games together. Other (but less popular) terminologies are gaming clans or communities describing the same thing.
There is a big difference between traditional gaming guilds and crypto-based gaming guilds. While the traditional type is limited to the game itself the crypto variant aims to become a platform to support new gamers.
Let’s quickly step back. Traditional gaming guilds became popular, especially through the popularity of E-sports. Guilds specialize in one specific competitive game and try to get the best talents for this specific game with the aim of ranking high in competitions, winning prizes and ranking high on the overall scoreboard.
The crypto-based guilds really started to take off with the rising popularity of Axie Infinity, a pokemon inspired Play-2-Earn NFT game with millions of users worldwide. In the current Play-2-Earn game designs often the gamer needs to purchase first game-specific NFTs - sort of as an entry ticket - and only then can start using that NFT in the game to start playing and earning the in-game token. For Axie Infinity for example, you first buy an Axie from the Axie Marketplace (Axies btw are those little pokemon like monsters that you see below). The current prices for an Axie sits around $100 USD. Once you have an Axie, you can start playing the actual game and start making money.
Depending on the hours you play and how good you are, you can make $30-40 USD per day. You may think, it’s not worth it but here is the thing - During Corona many third-world countries like Philipines and Vietnam started to play Axie Infinity and made more money per day than in their normal day job. Many also left their job to play full-time Axie Infinity. Think about that for a second (!) - The NFT space is only around 3 years old and these are some of the macro impacts it has.
At the same time those countries can not afford that easily an Axie to start playing and here is where Crypto Gaming Guilds started. Yield Guild Games (YGG) is the biggest gaming guild currently. They started to create an NFT renting model - called scholarship. People e.g. from Philipines could now borrow an Axie for free and start playing and earning. YGG would then take a cut from the rewards and distribute it to the community manager and the YGG treasury while 70% went to the scholar i.e. player. YGG also buys lands and other NFT assets and which ultimately rewards YGG and their guild members.
This model proved to be very successful and YGG onboarded many other games and others copied the same model and started to tap into this market
The so-called GameFi is rapidly changing the gaming landscape. The GameFi space is still very young and time will tell how successful Play-2-Earn and NFT Gaming Guilds will be. With that, I need to also mention that the topic NFT and Gaming is very polarizing whereby most hardcore gamers are hating the idea of NFTs and Play-2-Earn and see this only as another way for large game publishers like Ubisoft to monetize and squeeze the gamers. If you are interested in the debate you may want to watch this video. Have a great Sunday.
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