Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian firmly believes that play-to-earn gaming has a future despite the decline in popularity of some major P2E games.
In a recent Twitter thread, Ohanian, who is the founder and current general partner at Web3-focused venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, said that play-to-earn “will become the standard for video games in the future.”
“Within the next five years, most gamers won’t be playing games unless they are being properly valued for that time.”
Despite the failure of play-to-earn games like Axis Infinity, Ohanian is convinced that such games are the future of the gaming industry.
He views Axi Infinity’s collapse as a temporary setback, claiming that as crypto and NFT trading technologies scale, the play-to-earn game will become a no-brainer.
Ohanian cited the six-figure sales of a virtual nightclub (Club Neverdie) in the early 2000s game Entropia Universe, as well as Most recent six-figure sale Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) skins, which is why he believes the P2E concept will make a comeback.
“With the recent advancements in Web3, there are even more ways for players to do what they’ve been doing for free for years,” he added.
While there are certainly challenges to play-to-earn gaming, Ohanian is confident that as the wider public becomes more familiar with crypto and NFT trading, the model will become more widely accepted.
Ohanian is an investor in several gaming companies, including Axi Infinity creator Sky Mavis, and has been a strong supporter of crypto-field video games.
Earlier this year, amid all the pessimism about the future of the crypto industry, Ohanian said crypto, and bitcoin in particular, is here to stay Despite recent unfortunate developments in the industry including the collapse of FTX.
At the time, he compared the advent of blockchain to the creation of paper, saying that we would start to see more and more applications for this technology that would “mix in value and utility” over the years.
Other Crypto Veterans Argue That P2E Is Not Sustainable
Ohanian’s belief in the future of play-to-earn gaming runs contrary to the views of many other crypto executives and game developers, who argue that the model is not sustainable.
As noted by Mark Otero, founder and CEO of Azra Games expressed doubt With regard to the viability of the play-to-earn concept.
Instead, he said that a Web3 game needs to be good enough that people adopt it for the gameplay and not the NFTs or its in-game tokens.
Otero said that the game’s Web3 elements should only reveal themselves after players “fall in love with them”, enhancing the user experience and bringing added value to the game.