From the early days of the video game industry, developers have sought to create worlds as compelling as real life. While GameFi’s technological advances in graphics, computation, and more have certainly helped bridge the gap, it still lacks many of life’s fundamental incentives. For instance, it hasn’t fully found the appropriate incentives to help gamers earn a living of real value. But, GameFi being an emerging crypto-gaming category, may potentially make playing a full-time profession for the global gaming masses.
What’s GameFi?
GameFi is one of the hottest things in the cryptocurrency world recently. The technology is a combination of both the old-fashioned and thrill of winning prizes with new crypto developments in what’s known as DeFi. Within GameFi, players can trade, lend or rent out their winnings or even borrow against them. Its popularity rose to higher scalability with the incorporation of all the trade, loan, and rent-out abilities to the GameFi players.
GameFi Decentralization
GameFi — also known as “play-to-earn” — is the marriage of gaming and blockchain-powered financialization. Whether through quests, trading, or other mechanisms, GameFi allows gamers to earn digital assets for their in-game efforts.
While traditional games have allowed players to accrue and trade digital assets for decades, they could lose their investment at any time if the publisher shut the game down or went out of business. GameFi games, on the other hand, keep their assets stored on a distributed network. These operate independently of any single organization, substantially derisking the digital assets.
Defi stands for decentralized finance, a field in which token-based transactions like lending and borrowing take place on blockchains, decentralized digital ledgers similar to that first used with Bitcoin. GameFi refers to decentralized applications with economic incentives in its most common usage.
Those generally involve tokens granted as rewards for game-related tasks such as winning battles, mining precious resources, or growing digital crops. It’s an approach also known as play-to-earn. In many GameFi apps, such as Alien Worlds, users can also earn money passively by letting others mine their virtual lands. They can also earn interest by using techniques developed by DeFi platforms to lend assets like digital characters or deposit them in what’s known as staking.
As its popularity soars to a great level, there’s a debate over whether GameFi will remake gaming or just separate the credulous from their money. Reports of people borrowing to play raise the prospect of GameFi democratizing crypto opportunities — or becoming a form of digital sharecropping.
GameFi has the protocol which is the first GameFi mining pool protocol, aiming to build the first global Gamefi aggregation platform, and its governance token is GFI, with the holders of this token forming GFPDAO.
A Players First Journey on GameFi
There are particular starter requirements of each GameFi title that varies, but most games need their players to possess a funded wallet and buy a few items to participate.
Get a crypto wallet
Crypto wallet helps house your crypto and NFTs and generally allows one to go about digital business. It can’t just be any wallet, as there are several kinds, and they don’t all work with every crypto ecosystem. This means that one should check compatibility before setting one up. For instance, if a game was built under the Ethereum network, one needs an Ethereum-compatible wallet, like MetaMask, to play.
Fund your wallet
In the case of games that don’t allow players to grind out their first few digital currency units through play, users will need to fund their wallets to engage meaningfully. The particular cryptocurrency will depend on the game, and you may have to jump through a few hoops to get the token you need.
While you can download GameFi games free of charge, you won’t be able to play most titles until you invest in the world through some kind of purchase — often a character or an upgrade. These items can be expensive. For example, to enter the world of Axie Infinity, you’ll need to buy three NFTs that, even at the cheaper end, mean dropping around $600.
Takeaways
The definition of a modern-day gamer seems to have shifted with the introduction of blockchain technology to the gaming industry. Gamers are looking forward to an era where they will move from playing for virtual rewards applicable only on the gaming network to assets that have real value.
GameFi seeks to build that revolution, although the ups and downs still suffice. The GameFi technology has potential but it hasn’t done enough to convince the global market of what it can do for the gaming community. However, as blockchain adoption perpetually grows, we could see a rise in blockchain gamers’ numbers, even though only time will tell.
