Enough with “unplayable” P2E games, these Web3 experts share how to level up your…

One of the most popular forms of metaverse games at the moment is play-to-earn (P2E) games. But if you’re still out of the loop, P2E games are exactly what they sound like—games where users can earn cryptocurrencies and/or NFTs.

On paper, P2E games sound like a great idea as players can enjoy a game while making money.

However, the question is, how sustainable are these kinds of games?

During a panel discussion at Wild Digital SEA 2022, a tech conference by Catcha Group, three crypto experts shared their thoughts on the topic. Namely, the panellists were:

• Cora Chen, Head of China at Polygon
• U-Zyn Chua, Co-Founder and CTO at Singapore-based Cake DeFi
• Cheng Guo, Founder and CEO of StepVR

It’s currently more about earning, less playing

Considering the relative newness of blockchain tech in the mainstream, its stability and sustainability have naturally been under speculation.

This is something metaverse-related games have not escaped from, especially when it comes to P2E games, which are not without their own controversies, as U-Zyn from Cake DeFi revealed during the discussion.

“We see a lot of users playing it not so much for the fun of that, but more to farm the economy, so you play more to earn money rather than for fun,” U-Zyn shared.

He continued to explain that a lot of these games are funded by inflation—the more you play the game, the more tokens you generate, and you attract more people to join the game.

However, according to him, in the early days, blockchain had been created with a core game, which was mining.

“Mining is actually a game where you do something and enrich yourself but that something that you do ends up enriching the ecosystem,” U-Zyn reasoned. “Because the mine that you do ends up securing the blockchain and makes it more robust and secure.”

But he hasn’t seen this concept of enrichment in P2E gaming yet. To him, whenever someone farms on a P2E game, they’re taking something away from the rest of the community, hurting everyone else that’s playing the game.

“It’s a race, kind of the bottom,” he concluded.

As such, U-Zyn hopes to see play-to-earn games come up with a solution so that players to do something within the game ends up enriching everyone in the ecosystem—like a real-world economy.

More playable P2E games, please

For China-based StepVR’s Cheng Guo, the most important thing for a P2E game is that it has to actually be playable.

He added, “This revolution will only happen in the metaverse because if we build a game now, we’re competing with [studios like] Blizzard and Activision, who invest billions of dollars every year on a few games. That’s a huge amount of money to develop a game.”

Due to this difference in funding, Cheng believes that it’s unreasonable to expect NFT-related games to compete with those games in terms of playability.

Instead, he believes that the infrastructure must first be improved before it can disrupt the gaming industry with new ways to play, such as StepVR’s technology, which the founder likens to the tech in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi film, Ready Player One.

Cora from Polygon, a platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development and Web3, thinks that the main problem with P2E games is that that creators don’t know how to balance the gaming experience, earning, and sustainability.

“A lot of players in the Web2 gaming industry that enter Web3 will immediately think about building the tokenomics and they don’t really think about improving the quality of the gaming,” she said.

She also pointed out that Web3 games’ lifecycles are…