Do you know? In the US, gaming is bigger than Hollywood, NBA & NHL combined. The global gaming market is expected to reach a value of 300 billion dollars by 2026. Play to Earn is an extremely interesting and exciting development in the gaming industry right now. The promise of play-and-earn is to provide an immersive web3/ metaverse gaming experience that allows players to enjoy their time in virtual worlds and have the option of earning from it.

How is crypto gaming different from traditional gaming?

Let’s take an example of a famous game called PUB-G. While playing this game, you play to defeat or kill other players in-game. If you or your team wins “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner”. Players also purchase skins, weapons, clothes, etc to make the game seem more fun. But, there is no real-life value backing the in-game items. You cannot sell what you buy in-game outside the gaming ecosystem. But inside the game, these items are truly valuable. 

People play Pub-G for hours a day to collect/buy the unique items they always wanted to own.  What if we were able to convert in-game items into real money? And what about owning the items we purchase or even owning a plot of land inside PUB-G?. This would create a whole new game dynamic. Well, that’s basically where P2E games are different.

In P2E games, you can own the in-game items and sell them on the open marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, etc for real money. These in-game items are basically NFTs. The transformative part that sets crypto gaming apart from traditional gaming is Blockchain technology’s NFT & also Metaverse, obviously.

Why is P2E a life-changing opportunity?

Earning an income by playing games is like a dream come true for loads of people. Thousands of people of every age are now playing P2E games to earn passive incomes. Few of the P2E games don’t require an initial investment. But popular ones require the players to make an initial investment in terms of buying the ecosystem’s token to unlock features & more.  To overcome this, guilds are popular in the space. 

Play-to-earn crypto gaming guilds are organizations made up of investors, gamers, and managers who act as facilitating intermediaries by purchasing in-game items such as land and in-game assets in the form of NFTs and then lending them out to hundreds of thousands of players who earn yields by using those gaming assets in the respective virtual worlds. As a result, funds are being transferred between different groups of players. It significantly lowers the barrier to entry into P2E games for all players. It also gives everyone a fair chance to engage in the metaverse economy by making NFT assets more available to everyone. Finally, it offers a win-win situation for both the players who rent the NFTs and the game developers.

Hence, using play to earn games, people can make a nice monthly passive income! Fun + Money = Win-Win. 

But there lies an in-depth question. 

Are P2E games really a passive income source if it requires players to play more than 6 hours a day?

According to Wikipedia, the definition of Passive Income is:

Passive income is income that can be earned automatically with minimal labour to earn or maintain. 

On average a player spends at least 4-6 hours playing these games. So why would you count this as their passive income? Any source of income that requires you to work for hours is a job! So lets into some data:

Most of the players who play P2E games belong to developing countries where the employment rate or income is low. Hence, Play-to-Earn proved to be their Knight in Shining Armour. Earning an approximate income of $100-300 per month by playing games is not bad for these players.

However, there are two catches here:

1. Some P2E games are free to play i.e don’t require an initial investment but here the rewards also trickle in small fractions. 
2. Most of the P2E however involves medium to high investments to allow players to even play and tokens & NFTs. For example, you would need a minimum of 3 Axies to start playing Axie Infinity. But here, the rewards are high too.

As a result, on the financial side, it all boils down to personal preference. Why would you play games for 6 hours a day to earn tokens or NFTs if you have a full-time job that pays well enough to sustain your life? And if you’re struggling to make ends meet, playing games and earning money is a dream come true.

However, crypto games do not just serve the purpose of passive money through farming, defeating, and so on in-game. You never know when the in-game NFTs you earn will become an asset worth millions of dollars on the open market. Furthermore, as the game’s popularity grows, the token price climbs, increasing the player’s gross profit.

For example, when you play Axie Infinity you earn SLP & AXS as rewards. Both of these tokens are listed on major exchanges and are traded excessively leading to ATHs. 

Conclusion

P2E games are one of a kind innovation that is taking the gaming industry to levels that were unimaginable a few years ago. The  Metaverse added furl to the gaming ecosystem as well. And when it comes to “Is playing P2E a source of passive income?”, it comes to one’s preference. $100-300 per month is a privilege to some people living in developing countries.