# Gaming in crypto Most people play games because of: * The gameplay is fun * Social interaction in the gameplay Play to earn games add another reason: * Earning The opens up a new userbase and potentially increases the community around games, further increasing their popularity. ## Why don't centralised games have earning? Some do but they have the following problems: * Game companies skew the marketplaces so they capture the profit. They can do this because the control all aspects of the marketplace/game. * The in-game marketplaces can be changed by the company at anytime, and players can be banned. So all the players efforts could easily to taken from them. * External marketplaces are hard to trust. See this article on external marketplaces for World of Warcraft - [The best places to buy WoW gold (dont get scammed)](https://yourmoneygeek.com/the-best-places-to-buy-wow-gold-dont-get-scammed/) * Can you take any profits with you and use them in the real world? ## Risks Vampire attacks e.g Instagra -> Twitter, one open platform, one closed, the open platform has all it's 'Graph, network, meta data' taken ## Why will blockchains be used for in game earning? ### Infrastructure * DeFi legos means you can create a marketplace easily and cheaply * Crypto Fiat on/off ramps are available all over the world, creating potentially larger markets ### Liquidity * The is liquidity readily available in crypto to seed marketplaces and drive value ### Trust * In-game NFTs are built on open standards and are owned by the player not the game company. * In-game NFTs can be taken outside the game ecosystem, a forcing function for downward pressure on the game company value extraction. * Trust not needed for crypto marketplaces. ### Community * Because in-game NFTs can be used outside the game, cross-game communities can grow (external marketplaces, NFTs used in multiple games etc) that can increase the whole ecosystem size. ### Non-fungibility * NFTs are non-fungible outside of the game, which could create collector items and drive value through scarcability. Potentially this would drive much larger value then just in-game value (eg. think of how valuable a Pikachu NFT external to the game would be) ### Permissionless cross-game usecases * Interesting to see what usecases could come out of this. Could use it to bootstrap a community? ### Potential new business models * The contract for NFTs can be made in such a way that the create takes a cut of every sale of an item. This could create a recurring revenue stream for in-game items * Other business models?