What is the main differences between Play to Earn and Play and Earn

To understand how such a phenomenon as P2E appeared, we need to turn to history.

Back in 2014, the concept of NFT was born in the face of crypto punks. An unknown collection of paintings was taken more as a meme than something serious. Nobody has no idea that now each item of the collection is not owned by the company or the author, but by the users themselves. Moreover, every single item is unique and can't be copied. From this moment, the developers could not cut the user's earnings on the game, since it was players who were the owners of this or that item. It took the crypto community 4 years to realize such an innovative idea, and so in 2017 the first P2E game CryptoKitties was released, it was raw, nondescript and without much gameplay, all you could do was breed cats and get other cats.

 

A year has passed and the audience of the game has grown to 1.5 million people who have carried out transactions for more than 40M. How did a game that couldn't compete with other games on Steam and had no gameplay manage to gain such a huge audience? The answer is simple, developers let their users earn. Now, to play the game, you had to buy a cat, not a game, it was free, but an in-game item, moreover, the cat belonged only to you and it already had a cost. And if this cat was breeded, then it was possible to get one more and more, and each of them had a cost. Later, this concept will be called PP2E.

 

The sale of all cats or materials from the game was completely legal, and users sold them without fear of being banned or scammed. And at the initial stages, people received huge amounts of money from them. Still, the P2E market grew like crazy and only 1 year passed from zero to 2.5 billion capitalization. You must have read the news about how schoolchildren earned huge sums by playing games. But where are they from? And who even bought NFTs? The answers are simple, everyone who wanted to make money, that’s it, everyone who at least somehow saw the news about it, entered the game, bought cats, speculated, or simply played a lot to upgrade their pets to sell them at a higher price. It turned out to be such an auction of greed where the first ones who bought cats had huge profitability, the rest wanted to repeat after them until the last happy owners of cats that are worth nothing remain. And out of a noble desire to play games and make money on this, projects slowly but surely began to turn into pyramids.

Moreover, in absolutely artificial many development teams created the game, pumped it up with money, and buy NFTs from themselves, after which they leaked it to naive users. The further it went, the more scam schemes were used by projects. So the number of people who could really make money on games and suitable projects became less and less. The word P2E began to be associated with negativity, and against the backdrop of a falling market, it generally became synonymous with scam. But the desire of people to earn on games still has nowhere to go. P2E needs changes and rebranding.

Developers begin to communicate with the audience, asking about their needs and trying to clean up the tarnished reputation of this area. Projects come out and are constantly, updated and schemes for earning are slowly becoming like normal games.

The creators of P2E mainly attracted funds that invested with the expectation that they would quickly get rich and leave the project. It's easy to track if you just look at the name of the funds that have entered similar projects and the number of investment rounds. Most often, such projects did not survive beyond the A round. Having withdrawn fiat or being deceived, people also lost interest in games, which closed the door to eSports or any long-term project. As for guilds, P2E players were invited from the guild to lure people in and give the appearance of the popularity of the game.

On the other hand, P&E has good development teams that are ready to make a quality and finished product. This attracts long-term investors who are looking to the future of the sector and are willing to wait several years to recoup their investment. With a good product and stable online, P2E also opens doors to eSports. Moreover, they can be placed on different playgrounds, for example, in UOS - this is an analog of steam only for NFT, which opens the door for them to a huge audience.

 

The P&E concept has a long way to go to clear its reputation and carve out a niche in the gaming space. This is no doubt a long way, and no one fully understands in what form it will be. There is only one thing that can be said with certainty: if it is P&E or any other model, the gaming industry's future will be with WEB3.

Based on this technology, developers and players will be able to solve the problems of privacy, strict regulation by gaming companies, the convenience of in-game operations and withdrawal of funds, and most importantly, they will be able to build exactly the kind of games they want and not the developers. Indeed, in the near future, games made on the blockchain will allow enthusiasts and independent developers not only to make mods but to build the game exactly as they want.



This will be a new era of gaming where players will be involved not only by voting for new patch notes, but will also be able to create them themselves. Moreover, in the future, players will be able to make gaming their job and withdraw fiat from the game by paying a tax, since all transactions will be transparent and regulated.

What awaits us is not some kind of magic or another deception, but a natural stage in the evolution of games in which there will be an adjacent model of a Ponzi scheme and ordinary gaming. And the better developers can balance these two models, the more popular the game will be.