Will the game be the prototype of the metaverse?

What exactly is a blockchain game? Will it be the prototype of the universe? In 2021, game players are expected to reach 3 billion people. They compete, socialize, entertain, trade, and do more and more things in the game. This makes the game considered as the prototype of the metaverse and has become the current blockchain. investment focus in the field.

As early as 2017, Cryptokitties set off a wave of blockchain games, players can buy and sell these kittens and record the process of breeding these kittens on the blockchain. Every cat is a traceable, non-tamperable, irreplaceable digital asset, namely NFT. Although this game was short-lived, its significance was to provide a better application scenario for the complex and abstract cryptocurrency at that time. Since then, blockchain games have developed various categories such as racing, business simulation, and shooting, especially this kind of sandbox blockchain game, a large-scale 3D open world, where players are transformed into avatars to move freely. Like a rough version of the metaverse. However, in addition to these appearances, there is a core requirement for discussing the metaverse today: economy, NFT can transform virtual items into digital assets, and at the same time, it needs a sufficiently dynamic mechanism to give it liquidity.

In this context, the concept of GameFi came into being. Simply put, it is the combination of blockchain games and decentralized finance. How to understand this? First of all, you have to know that in traditional games, players can also buy and sell items and earn real money. This is not new, but the problem is that under the centralized operation of game companies, these items do not really belong to players. In 2011, Google decided to stop operating one of its online games. Players' virtual possessions evaporated in an instant, and in a rage, they filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, and GameFi tried to break the situation.

Today, on various platforms, you can often see Axie infinity mentioned at the beginning of the video. As the leader of blockchain games, he carefully designed the economic system. Before the game starts, players need to use ether to buy three pets, and they can get two game tokens through battle. In turn, players can spend game tokens to breed new pets, and then sell them to earn ether. Game tokens can also be freely bought and sold in the market. This token called AXS also has a special function that allows gamers to use it like voting to jointly decide how the game will be updated, revised, and operated in the future. In the white paper, game developers plan to form decentralized governance by 2023, giving players real leadership. In addition to this beautiful vision, more players are still attracted by the benefits of playing and earning.

In Venezuela, the average monthly salary is about 50 US dollars, and full-time playing this game can earn four or five hundred US dollars per month. Under this temptation, countless players poured into Axie, because the revenue of airplane games even surpassed that of PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings, the two most profitable mobile games in the world, but there are also many problems with blockchain games. It takes a lot of computing power to run, and the game cannot be too complicated. The production level of today's blockchain games is far less than those of those 3A meditations, and the economic system is not so healthy. For example, the number of game tokens has been oversupplied, and Axie infinity’s current revenue mainly depends on attracting new players to pay for them. These players are mostly concentrated in underdeveloped areas such as Venezuela and the Philippines, and many people are forced to play games for a living. In fact, the incomes of Filipino players are already declining, and some are even below the minimum wage.

It can be said that blockchain games are still far from the envisioned metaverse. Today, we must be especially vigilant against those scams in the name of the Metaverse, so as to avoid turning players in the game into workers.

This article was originally published on the "MetaFarm" public platform, so stay tuned for more in-depth interpretations of the Metaverse.