The first wave The play-to-earn (P2E) gaming boom appears to be coming to an end. There are still many blockchain studios running successful multi-million dollar raises around the globe, but the competition for funding has intensified to the point where only prominent projects are gaining backers.
With a great strategy more important than ever, here are some tried-and-true steps you can take that will help you stand out when you’re looking for capital and preparing for takeoff.
Gain experience in the traditional realm of game studios
The blockchain game market is full of builders who have crypto experience but haven’t built traditional games.
I am the prime example. Pegaxy was the first game I worked on and the first I launched. Like many other web3 games of its time, its mechanics and graphics were quite basic at first. But while simplicity was fine with the web3 gaming crowd, it’s become increasingly clear that P2E will need to appeal to traditional Web 2.0 players if it wants to scale, and those players are demanding a lot more. To satisfy this demographic, builders will need games that have it all: great graphics, solid mechanics, and rich lore.
You can have the best team and the best game, but without a solid monetization strategy, they mean little.
That’s why a founding team that combines an understanding of web3 fundamentals with experience building and monetizing Web 2.0 games for mobile, desktop and console platforms will set you apart in this market.
This is also why, after Pegaxy was launched, we founded Mirai Labs. We wanted to assemble a team of experts to build games that appeal to the traditional gaming community.
Develop a clear and straightforward monetization strategy
Most traditional P2E games have fairly simple revenue models that rely on users buying and holding tokens that serve as in-game currency.
This means that when large groups come together and play a game at once, token prizes and earnings increase together. But when market conditions change—or when players simply lose interest in a game—there can be a mass exodus of users. This is bad for revenue and can be disastrous for token prices. Therefore, building a game that will succeed in the long term means developing monetization strategies that can withstand the ebbs and flows of the market, ones that combine the best of web3 technology with proven revenue models of Web 2.0.
