What if I told you that the next stage of gaming would be the kind where you made money playing the game. No streaming or any additional set up required. Just literally playing a game.
This next stage of gaming is called Play to Earn games (or P2E for short) and these are the future of video games. Companies will pay you to spend time in their universe and they will also reward or pay you for continuing to choose to stay.
This revolution has already begun with games in Web 3 already implementing this in a variety of ways. NFT projects like Creepz, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Swampverse have their own cryptocurrency which is rewarding holders who continue to stake (locking down your NFTs for long periods of time) or hold their NFTs. They also award currency to people that perform tasks or solve in-game puzzles.
Metaverse games like The Sandbox also have a play-to-earn format but use a slightly different approach. They allow players to convert their cash into in-game currency and their in-game currency back in to cash. This allows creators inside the game who are selling artwork, assets, or access to experiences to convert their profits back into actual cash should they ever need to do so. This is allowing creators within the confines of the game to actually make a living playing the game.
So why should you care?
The ramifications of these changes will be felt in every aspect of the entertainment industry. The transition from web 2 to web 3 is changing economics as we know it. We are moving from a cash economy to an attention economy.
Your time, money, and now your attention will be the most valuable commodities. Companies will reward you for the time and money you spend in their universe.
The best part of about all of this is that these new projects have a certain interoperability because they are being built on decentralized platforms.
What this will eventually mean is that when you find something better, rather than losing all that time and progress you made on that video game, you can convert all your assets into cash and take all your accumulated wealth to another universe and set up shop there. Every asset you earn or buy is sellable on the blockchain.
The different types of economics that are being employed for all of this is insane and what it means for the future of entertainment as we know it is still unclear but as a consumer we are all about to gain a whole new type of power over our time and attention. And that is extremely exciting.
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Hope you enjoyed this post.
Over the next couple of weeks I'll be unpacking a lot of these abstract Web 3 concepts and projects that incorporate them in unique ways. I'll also be talking about some cool stuff happening in the media industry and what to keep your eyes on.
Keep your eyes peeled for those!
See you next week!
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