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Reddit founder predicts 90% of games will be Play-to-Earn crypto in 5 years (independent.co.uk)
9 points by jedwhite on Jan 19, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Are people reporting this because he's a tech founder so he must be smart? Because that figure doesn't make any sense at all. Play-to-Earn will be a thing, but 90% of games? Is he aware of how many games exist and how many are passion projects from individual developers and small teams that care about quality vs milking players?

For every Ubisoft, there's a dozen Eric Barone and Tarn Adams that care about creating art and entertainment.

Sorry, that's just a dumb prediction with no basis in reality. If you were to say 90% of worldwide game revenue will come from crypto scams^Hschemes, I would have an easier time believing it.


I wonder if 90% of playtime would be a more fitting number. There's a dozen passion indie projects for every triple a game but the triple as get the lions share of play time


I don’t know why the assumption that crypto revolutionizes a model that already exists. Crypto first needs proliferation as a payment and identity solution, which perhaps is already a baked in assumption for many

An interesting case study is the original release of Diablo 3. All items could be traded on the real money auction house, and top items were incredibly rare and thus also expensive; I had a friend who farmed an entire summer and used the proceeds to buy a MacBook for college.

That said, blizzard removed the system in place of one with nontradable items where it’s easier to get decent drops.


Turning video games into jobs won't provide a livable wage, it will be an unregulated, unsustainable heap of exploitation. Most of us will be rotting away in front of our computers so that a few people can keep living it up.

Nobody wants this virtual future. Nobody wants to be a slave. Nobody wants to be unhealthy. Nobody wants to waste away with a VR headset. A VR headset simply can't be a replacement for a clean, healthy world.


Not only the users of Reddit are weird...

Could be possible though, basically like the old WoW gold farmers for ingame assets. But I assume that a large portion of the audience would reject such models, but it may attract others. For me personally it would kill the fun of playing video games.


> “In five years, you will actually value your time properly, and instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don’t actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you’ll actually earn value and you will be the harvester.”

Wasn't there a company in the dotcom era that installed a browser toolbar and paid people to click on ads? I think they went bust because they paid too much and it wasn't sustainable.

So I can only imagine the pennies worth of not-even-money coins the new companies will be 'rewarding' players with.


There was software you could install to get paid to simply browse the internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf


This is already the case for these kinds of games, isn't it? There are third world operations making in game cash to sell on black markets for real money for virtually every game with a trading system. I don't see how a game could be designed where the money could be worth it at all for an American playing and not get swamped by people in low cost of living areas to drive the profit back down to nothing.


What about bots and elaborate macros? They have existed in almost every game I can think of. Once games go Play-to-Earn it will draw the attention of the most clever and enterprising individuals finding ways to exploit it.


Entropia Universe pioneered play to earn 19 years ago, I doubt adding "crypto" on top will make anything different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropia_Universe


When you have whales buying game assets with crypto, you avoid platform commissions (30%) and sales taxes (10% on average and rising, globally). This is really the chief innovation of P2E games.


Reddit lads have an investment in the L2 M&A wallpaper-job sidechain MATIC.




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