By Rian Rabinowitz
Innovators have continued to redefine gaming paradigms for decades.
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The concept of ownership in games has been on a spectrum since the first arcade game hit the American mainstream in the 1960s. Since then, consoles, computers and mobile devices have continued to redefine the gaming experience and power dynamic between creators and players. Web3, a new blockchain-based era for the Internet, is the closest that players have come to “ownership.”
Historically, gamers do not own their games, their progress, or their time. It is a myth to think otherwise. Developers hold the skeleton key, and they are the ones to profit. After years of conceptualizing, designing, and building immersive worlds–not to mention investing an immense amount of capital–developers can turn a game off at any moment.
Consider FarmVille. In late 2020, Facebook announced that it would cease to support Flash-based games. At the flip of a switch, an entire ecosystem, years of history, was deleted forever without the consent of its players.
With blockchain technology, that dynamic has shifted. Developers are no longer Lord and Master; players have the power. Through tokenization and in-game economics, gamers can extract monetary value in the form of a portable asset from the games they play. The play-to-earn model is a simple yet revolutionary concept, and one that is upending the in-game experience for players, developers, and…
