Play to secure your retirement? Sounds completely absurd at first, but according to Hilmar Veigar Pétursson it would be a conceivable and worthwhile goal for the industry, as if from one Report from Wccftech emerges.
Pétursson is the managing director of CCP Games, the Icelandic developers of Eve Online, which in turn belong to the South Korean Pearl Abyss (Black Desert Online, DokeV, Crimson Desert).
In one Interview mit The Korea Economic Daily He demanded that the game industry must enable users to build up retirement provision with money from games:
Gamers hope that adding value in online gaming will find application in the real world. Content from the gaming world should also have real use in reality. The gaming industry must allow gamblers to use gaming money to secure their retirement plans.
Pétursson is alluding to the Play to Earn (P2E) principle, which has existed as a concept for a long time, but is pick ing up traction again due to the new NFT hype. With P2E games, users can use services Earn real money in the game
A CNBC report even suggests that people in the Philippines may use the Axie Infinity P2E game to make a living during the coronavirus pandemic.
The blockchain has long been used for games. In Axie Infinity, we breed creatures for PvE and PvP combat. The specialty: every little animal is an NFT. Trading them has become a billion dollar business.
NFTs: Banned, feared, celebrated
The key to making money in games lies in NFTs, or the underlying technology called blockchain. These systems are currently entering the gaming market, but have anything but a good reputation with gamers: Ubisoft’s introduction of NFTs with the Quartz program was downright torn up on the Internet and the makers of Stalker 2 only rowed for a short time due to strong fan reactions completely back after the announcement of NFTs.
For the CCP boss Pétursson, however, P2E games are the future. Items, monsters, cars and other in-game items are then no longer part of a database owned by the game manufacturer, but belong to the free movement of goods. As Wccftech reports, he said in 2018:
I can well imagine that in a few decades you will only be piling up things in games that really belong to you. You will not only play a game to get away from it all and have fun, but also to feed your family. Because the goods in the virtual world are then nothing else than those in today’s economy.
NFTs and cryptocurrencies are currently highly controversial in the gaming sector: Steam, for example, categorically blocks such titles, while Epic welcomes them to its own store. EA believes in introducing NFTs for Fifa Ultimate Team while fans are storming the idea.
Know even more: Do you want to know exactly how P2E works and why corporations invest millions in P2E games? In the GameStar podcast, Michael Graf and management consultant Human Nagafi delve deeper into the darker side of blockchain and crypto gaming!
