Do you know that you can start earning real-value currencies when you download and play certain games? If you didn’t, now you do. Gamers like yourself have been earning from games like Metarun (the first blockchain-based P2E game), Decentraland, Alien Worlds, and Axie Infinity.
Blockchain games have been around since 2017, but at the time, they didn’t gather much attention up until 2021 when they started grabbing the attention of gaming industries all over the world. Today there are tons of blockchain-based games you can start playing to earn by cryptocurrency trade exchange.
Today’s guide however isn’t focused on the type of games but on what blockchain games are and how they gained popularity. Are you curious about the blockchain-based gaming industry? Continue reading to learn more.
What is a blockchain game?
A blockchain game—also popularly known as a crypto game or NFT game—is a video game that contains elements used in cryptography-based blockchain technologies. The blockchain elements you’ll find within the video games are mostly based on the use of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) or cryptocurrency in which players can choose to either buy, sell, or even trade with other players and the game publisher collects a certain fee from each transaction as a form of monetization.
Blockchain games provide gamers or players with true ownership of the assets acquired in the game. For example, assets obtained within the blockchain game such as in-game points/currency and skins can be traded for cryptocurrencies that can be further converted into fiat money (currencies like the dollar, euro, etc).
How did blockchain gaming become so popular?
The very first game to use blockchain technologies was known as Cryptokitties. Cryptokitties was launched for personal computers by Axiom Zen in November 2017. In the game, a player would have to purchase NFTs using Ethereum and each NFT is made of a virtual pet that the player can breed with other pets to create new breeds with combined traits as a new pet. The game started appearing in headlines a month later (December) when one virtual pet was sold for over $100,000. This caught the interest of crypto investors as more and more people started diving into online blockchain-based games.
In 2018, another popular game was released—it was named Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is another example of a P2E game; in this game, players purchase and improve the NFTs via in-game activities which are then resold to other gamers or players on the platform by the publisher and the player receives compensation for their commitment. Top players in the game were able to earn enough to cater for their cost of living by only playing and participating in the gaming platform. This game also shook gaming communities and further increased the popularity of the blockchain gaming industry.
Fast forward to the second half of 2021, the limited successes of games like Axie Infinity and the increasing corporate interest in the metaverse made more people interested in GameFi. By the end of 2021, a lot of major publishers including Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Take Two Interactive stated that NFT-based and blockchain games are under serious consideration for their companies in the future.
