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# System prepended metadata

title: Gaming in crypto

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# 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?


