The increasing interest in blockchain in the gaming world

The online gaming industry has experienced an exponential growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Statista, in 2020, the worldwide digital gaming spending on in-game content and paid downloads increased by 12% and 21%, respectively. Blockchain-based play-to-earn (P2E) games have also gained momentum.

The P2E business model combines entertainment and moneymaking. P2E games enable gamers' ownership over certain in-game assets and allows them to increase their value over time. This powerful concept incentivizes players to put in more time and effort into the game, as a monetary investment is at stake. In the Philippines or Venezuela, for example, P2E games are going as far as replacing full-time jobs for some players. This is thanks to the exuberance in cryptocurrency markets and the low barrier to entry for online gaming.

The key technological component of P2E games is a non-fungible token (NFT). In the crypto world, each NFT is a unique and non-replicable asset. NFT enables defining the ownership and the transfer to another person possible. Thanks to this capability, NFTs have experienced a strong growth in popularity and the gaming ecosystem is no exception to that.

Some big gaming studios are exploring the potential of P2E gaming and its development. However, there are no official plans on how to integrate NFTs into their games, yet. Meanwhile, smaller game studios are already experiencing success with P2E games integrating NFTs. For example, a well-known Vietnamese studio has released an Ethereum-based game where users buy NFT-characters. These characters can be sold on a NFT marketplace, thus generating revenue.