Play To Earn Is Not Sustainable

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What do you think is a “fair reward” for playing a game for 6-8 hours daily?

Whatever the number might be, it's definitely not $80/month and the current largest play to earn game could not even afford that.

Yes, this is day two of talking about Hamster Kombat, in a roll and it turns out that the TON blockchain handled the traffic much better than expected, probably thanks to the new Mintless Jetton Technology, as I discussed in yesterday's post.

Moving on, I've made some observations following the launch of the $HMSTR token on major exchanges. In the past, I've talked a couple of times on blockchain games being a potential channel to the mass adoption of blockchain technology.

Hamster’s exponential growth has proven that thesis right. Notwithstanding, there's evidence that the majority of said onboarded users do not intend to keep the value earned within the space.

It's mostly earn, dump, move on to the next.

Funny enough, that's not a problem as many may try to make it seem. There is only a problem if the onboarded users do not stick around to explore more of what blockchain has to offer, whether that means playing another game for airdrop or trading memecoins.

But again, this all, is not the focus of this article, far from it, there's something more eye-opening about the big launch of $HMSTR that takes me back to a recent post of mine on the “Web3's need for ads”.

I know, I know, what the fuck is ads doing in this conversation of blockchain games? Well, frankly speaking, this isn't the first time I've talked about ads in blockchain games, although other times, it was mostly about deep-integration within said games which would pave the way for similar execution on meta-universes.

Notwithstanding, in relation to hamster kombat, we are looking at traditionally and natively served ads.

The Unsustainability Of Play To Earn - Proven By Hamster Kombat

Qualifying players at the end of Hamster Kombat's season 1 is reported to be 131 million. Top players played for 5-6 months, averaging 6-8 hours game play.

No jokes, read the comments, people were highly invested in this shit. The sad news?

Most dedicated players leading the leaderboards got airdropped tokens worth less than $50 despite 6 months of playing. The average player earned less than $15, and with the price depreciating fast, these figures are mostly paper value and not what players were about to sell for.

One would wonder why this happened.

For starters, the team allocated more tokens to “influencers” and this hurt the allocation received by regular players. In addition, in-game activities that were introduced towards the end of the game was given higher airdrop weighting compared to mechanics that players were urged to focus upon.

That said, judging by the numbers, it's unlikely that “influencers” within the game were significant, so very few people got huge drops which the entire space was mad about.

All of these things lead to the realities of play to earn games. If you focus on influencers, you can't reward dedicated players, and if you try to reward dedicated players, you'd realize that you don't have that much money. Probably why Hamster Kombat had to reward influencers instead.

$15 to 131 million people is almost $2 billion. No project makes enough profit to give out such an amount. Besides, the only way a $15 reward is appreciated is if it's a day's pay, not for a fuckin 6 months job, that's just downright cowshit.

Due to this, Hamster Kombat is now an advertising network

Did some digging and discovered that they've always hinted at taking this route. Notcoin did the same, Hamster Kombat is doing the same, even some other popular mining project on TG called “Blum” is also doing something similar with what it calls a “memepad”.

Running a purely “play to earn” game is not sustainable, especially with with 30-100 million players, the only way to make reasonable income is to become a platform that promotes other smaller games for a fee that it reinvests in its economy.

The system is now purely made for advertisement and is likely to perform better(revenue-wise) than anything else(excerpt Tether of course) within crypto.