Play and Earn: Is a decentralised gaming metaverse the future?

WolfgangNeo81 found a great piece of land to build a shop to sell his latest crafted weaponry. All the clans around his village were crazy to buy these from him to gain an advantage of speed, accuracy, and bragging rights in the upcoming Clan Battles. The winner of the Clan Battles would not only rise to the top but also earn a significant amount of Metaverse tokens, which would make many millionaires.

The frenzy to buy Wolfgang’s crafted weapons has started and likely will make him a Metaverse millionaire too. He is going to expand his business to costumes within Metaverse but also take some of this money to expand to newer lands on Sandbox and Decentraland.

Being the owner of his shop, he is free to take his business where he desires and write his own destiny. WolfgangNeo81, in real life, lives in Mumbai, India, and is one of the millions of millionaires on Web3.

Such will be stories read, written, and inspiring others in the near future. Decentralised gaming metaverses are going to give autonomy through ownership to creators and users alike. These places will not only be ecosystems where people socialise, interact, play games, and entertain themselves, but also where there is a thriving economy. Metaverses are places where people like Wolfgang will live digitally and build for others living digitally.

Games like Roblox and Minecraft are already the new social networks for GenZ. These are places where they meet and interact with each other. COVID-19 lockdowns have only accelerated this behaviour. GenZ is happy playing Adopt Me on Roblox as their primary way to interact with each other as I was playing gully cricket with my friends during my childhood.

What these gaming ecosystems miss are an opportunity for users to add a layer of commerce to their interactions. Owning and using digital assets is the new utility, the new fashion, and the new style statement.

Fortnite makes billions of dollars by just selling cosmetic skins, but all those are created by the game developers themselves. Web3 gaming is going to democratize this economic layer and give ownership of this layer to the users and creators.

No longer will users and creators be tied to the rules created by Epic, Roblox, or Mojang but they will now be able to control their destiny and how they interact with these ecosystems thanks to decentralised ownership enabled by blockchain technology.

The crypto-token layer is an enabler for finance and commerce as these systems and tokenomics will also enable the creation of new interactions between users. Some of these we would have never seen in Web1 or Web2.

What most people don’t understand is that commerce is a form of interaction between parties and like all interactions, great commerce only thrives when both parties gain out of it. Money is an enabler of this commerce and we tend to overthink about money, particularly when it comes to games.

Historically, we have valued physical things as most of our needs were fulfilled by physical objects — like owning a house to protect us against weather and other risks. We desire to live comfortably by owning an AC to maintain moderate climatic conditions inside the house even though the outside weather may be hot and unfavourable.

We have fulfilled our desire for safety, food, and physical needs. Now, most of our desires have moved to more complex and intricate interactions. The digital world enables such interactions without any friction.

Web2 showed us how social status, a basal instinct can be harnessed in various ways from the number of followers, likes, views, comments, and how it created the current tech behemoths. However, the commerce layer on top of these Web2 applications was limited and primarily focussed on advertising, which needed users to compromise privacy and data. Web3 enables this commerce and finance layer more seamlessly and hence opens a completely different paradigm of interactions.

Games enable the most complex and intricate actions. This is why all interactions will, one way or another, become part of large gaming metaverses.

You will be banking, buying digital goods and services, finding online dates, tracking your real-world orders, playing with your friends and clans — all in gaming environments.

Decentralised gaming metaverses will encapsulate all the above digital human interactions in one place, and provide all users autonomy, competence, and relatedness. There is nothing else the human mind needs to satisfy itself. The future of how we live digitally is being created as you read this. All hail the decentralised gaming metaverses.