The most successful Web3 games of 2024 will shift from play-to-earn (P2E) to focusing on being completely free to attract players, says Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Dizon said that unlike games like Axie Infinity Classic, which require players to purchase at least three Axie non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to play, the new wave of blockbuster Web3 games will seek to eliminate the as many financial problems and technical barriers to entry as possible.
“There is a big understanding that for millions of people to be able to access a game, it must first be free.”
“There is an evolution of the business model where games can be played for free and then somewhere along the way, while you’re playing, you can mint an nft or start earning tokens, but there are a lot of new games. Not really. “We are starting by demanding ownership of NFTs from the beginning,” he said.
This shift toward a free-to-play model is part of a broader effort by Web3 game developers to put gameplay first and the token economy second, Dizon explained.
He added that the change forms a big part of the solution to the speculative bubbles in Web3 games. By creating games that players want to continue playing, they will reinvest their capital into the game and prevent the in-game economy from becoming a cash-generating machine, Dizon said.
Almost parallel to the decline in cryptocurrency prices, blockchain games witnessed their own slowdown as players and revenue flowed out of the ecosystem following the sudden collapse of Axie Infinity-related asset values in late 2021.
Surveys in October 2022 showed even the most adamant crypto players leaving in droves, citing the over-financialization of the game, lack of fun, and confusion around crypto wallet technology.
Dizon says all that is about to change.
“After Axie became popular two years ago, a lot of very experienced teams looked at its rapid rise and thought, ‘It’s a real industry now, maybe I could do better if I made my own game,'” he said.
“Many of these teams got funding at the end of 2021, and to make a really good game it typically takes two to three years.”
Over the past 18 months, Dizon and other Web3 gaming industry leaders have been eagerly awaiting the release of a number of new Web3 games in Q4 2023, such as the Nov. 16 Epic Games Store open beta. . launch from the blockchain-based collectible card game Parallel.
PRIME schedule is almost here. https://t.co/fXBVvboxx6
— Gabby Dizón | YGG (@gabusch) November 19, 2023
“Expect to see a lot of very high-quality games, with high-quality teams behind them, as well as new experiments in token economics and profit models,” he said.
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Dizon pointed to the introduction of the ERC-6551 token standard or “token-linked” accounts in games as a reason to be excited about blockchain-based games in the future, as some developers are using it to incorporate artificial intelligence. (ai) in games. .
“You can actually start attaching ai behaviors to your avatar and giving it instructions: ‘I want you to go out into the world, make me a weapon, kill some monsters, and then bring back the treasure,’ Dizon said. “Then a few hours later, you can look at the wallet that’s embedded in it and say, oh, I got this stuff back.”
Dizon believes this type of automation will greatly reduce the amount of “polishing” needed in games, allowing players to skip to the fun parts and leave the boring stuff to the ai.
“I think it will be the beginning of a new genre of games where you will interact with ai and not have to play all day,” he said. “You set parameters for the ai and just let it do things in the game world.”
“It’s going to get really interesting, man.”
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