A puppy at 150 euros, pretty cheap, right? French Dogami sells it. The problem is that the dog is in 3D. This is the access key to a video game planned this summer and sold as “the Tamagotchi of the third millennium”. Intuitively, such a purchase is a ruin. For this price, we could buy three “AAA” games on the PS5 and the worst, if we really love dogs, why not release our Nintendogs? This game is offered to raise a puppy on the Nintendo DS. A hit! 13that best -selling title in Japanese publisher history.
Except that Dogami promises you to earn money by playing. A gambling game? More precisely we call it “play to earn” (P2E), literally “play to win”. There is no Coubertin spirit here. In the genealogy of video game economic models, this game for profit will replace its well-known predecessor, the “free play”. You already know this: Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and all those mobile games, are certainly free, but the interaction mechanics do everything to bring you into microtransactions. To the point that some publishers have bypassed Rubicon by using explicit “pay to win”, such as the famous FarmVille, where the player must go to the cash register to have a chance to finish the game. This abuse has caused more than one. From now on, it feeds the narrative of game sellers to make money, this new El Dorado where we will return the steam to reward the player.
Succeed at being a real game
So how does it work and can you drop everything to breed dogs on your PC? In Dogami, each crypto-pup is an NFT, a unique token registered in a blockchain. So you can give it a go. The more quality breeding you provide, the more valuable it will be and, when we get there, the more money you will make. The local currency is the doga. This cryptocurrency allows you to buy food and accessories to take care of the dog. You can also convert your winnings into real euros – via intermediate conversion to bitcoins or ethers.
In these games, the characters in which one invests become financial assets. So they need a certain investment of time to prevent them from depreciation. The start-up has already sold 8,000 NFT dogs to an audience of 12 to 72 years old. A third of them are female, half own a dog and the same proportion are trying this type of game for the first time. The doga has a capitalization of more than 195 million euros. In December, Dogami raised € 6 million from global metaverse champion Animoca Brands (The Sandbox, Decentraland), and Ubisoft. We’ll have to wait until this summer to see if Dogami offers a good return to its investors and its virtual canine masters. The challenge? Succeed at being a real game without getting caught up in the single financial dimension of gaming to earn.
Ponzi scheme
Because until now, many of these games weren’t really fun. “If you play any game to earn a game, it’s disgusting, directed by Daniel Nathan, CEO of Homa Games studio. I don’t know anyone who has enjoyed Axie Infinity. » However, it is the best known of its kind. With its plump and colorful monsters, it looks like a Pokémon. But in hindsight, its mechanics are questionable …
“Current players are paid by newcomers. The more cards they buy, the more money it generates, but when the former becomes profitable on their initial bet, they allow the latter. To pay for it, you need new players all the time, which is like a Ponzi scheme [montage financier frauduleux, NDLR] ! ”, directed by Gabriel Mamou-Mani, the creator of NFT Panda Dynasty and member of the WeAreWeb3 collective, which works for a more ethical metaverse. “Unless there is exponential growth, it is not sustainable because, in order to get a player paid, the money has to come from where and, otherwise, another player will lose it”, abounds a great connoisseur.
Offshoring 3.0
The game experienced a strong development during the pandemic in the Philippines where many unemployed and confined workers came to find in Axie an interesting source of income. As France 24 reported on February: “Lumabi plays two hours a day in the small house with his parents and four sisters. He earns 8,000 to 10,000 pesos per month, or 155 to 195 dollars. Enough to pay his university fees and his fees. » The problem for players hoping for additional income is that in-game money, aptly named “Smooth Love Potion”, has lost 95% of its value in a year! What to ask in the play to earn as a serious source of income.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, crypto -investors who are attracted to Axie Infinity’s profits – but don’t want to spend their day here – are not directly appealing to these Filipinos to play for them. Such investment goes through intermediaries, such as Blackpool Finance. Some of these “passive income collectors of the metaverse” are seeing a new profession … with the stamp mark of offshoring version 3.0.
Should all these games be put in one basket? The founder of Dogami denied this. “We force players to have a maximum of two dogs per account,” said Bilal El Alamy. What, in theory, to avoid creating farms of low -paid players or metaverse workers. Only in theory, because nothing prevents an individual from creating several accounts.
Play and earn
Romain Potier, Web3 project manager at Homa Games, a young French game publisher who speeds up gaming to make money, is convinced we are in the wrong debate. “These games, and Web3 in general, mostly promise to own digital assets, not to make money online. I think this mechanic should be added to existing games or licenses, and be fun to play. »
Bilal El Alamy, who launched his metaverse just a year ago, summarizes it like this: “I think play to earn will turn into ‘play and earn’, in other words, the end is not about making money, but an advantage for those who play a lot or play well. » To reach more players – too limited in crypto spheres – he still wants to “switch to free game access”. If we follow everything, “free and earn”?
What if these terms, instead of describing a deep evolution of mobile games and online games, were in fact digital marketing? In any case, this is the opinion of Gabriel Mamou-Mani. The reward mechanics of these NFT -based games are, in his view, new tools for gamification and cashback, two well -known marketing instruments. In this sense, these P2E games can be very useful to brands; so their unrequited interest? As for the games that succeed in this sector, it is because they come directly from gambling, such as the horse races of Zed Run or the French star Sorare, which is nothing but sports betting. using collectible football cards in NFT. So far, we haven’t seen a real video game that combines narration and compensation, a real scenario and cryptos.
But we may forget one dimension. For Romain Potier, from Homa Games, “Buying NFTs and participating in the economy of these games also means believing in an actor and supporting him, a bit like crowdfunding”. However, to reach the maximum number, these new games will have to do with mobile app stores (App Store, Google Play …) and their 30% tax … An impossible financial equation, say most skeptical. But who said that playing to earn publishers are not gamers?