YGG co-founder says free-to-play Web3 games are the key to mass adoption - Cryptosaurus

Yield Guild Games CEO and co-founder Gabby Dizon says next year’s most successful Web3 games will focus on being completely free-to-play rather than play-to-earn (P2E) to attract players. do. to do.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Dizon said that unlike games like Axie Infinity – which require players to purchase at least three Axie non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to play – the new wave of hyper-successful Web 3 games will bring many financial And will try to attract technology. To remove as many barriers to entry as possible.

“It’s a great realization that for millions of people to engage with a game it first has to be free to play.”

“Business models have evolved where games are free to play, and then at some point while you’re playing, you’re able to create NFTs or start earning tokens, but there are a lot of new ones out there.” There are games that aren’t really being launched with a requirement for NFT ownership,” he said.

Dizon explained that this shift toward a free-to-play model is part of a broader effort by Web3 game developers to put gameplay first and tokenomics second.

He said this change is a big part of the solution to the speculative Web3 gaming bubble. By creating games that players want to continue playing, they will reinvest their capital into the game and, for example, prevent the in-game economy from becoming a cash-generating machine.

Running almost parallel to the decline in crypto prices, blockchain games saw their own slowdown as players and revenue dropped out of the ecosystem following the sudden drop in asset values related to Axie Infinity in late 2021.

Surveys in October 2022 revealed that even the most hardcore crypto gamers were leaving in large numbers, citing over-financialization of gameplay, lack of entertainment, and confusion around crypto wallet technology.

Dizon thinks all this is about to change.

“After Axie became popular two years ago, many very experienced teams looked at its rapid growth and thought: ‘This is a real industry now, maybe I can do better by making my own games,’” he said.

“A lot of these teams got funding in late 2021 and it usually takes 2 to 3 years to make a really good game.”

For the past 18 months, Dizon and other Web3 gaming industry leaders have been eagerly anticipating the launch of a series of new Web3 games in Q4, such as the Epic Games Store launch of the open beta of blockchain-based trading card game Parallel in November. 16.

Prime time is almost here.

– Gabby Dizon | YGG ️⚔️ (@gabusch) 19 November 2023

“Expect to see a lot of high-quality games, with high-quality teams behind them, as well as new experiments in tokenomics and earning models,” he said.

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Dizon pointed to the introduction of the ERC-6551 token standard or “token bound” accounts in gaming as a reason to be excited about blockchain-based games in the future as some developers are using it to thread artificial intelligence into games. are using. are using it.

“You can actually start attaching AI behaviors to your avatar and you can give it instructions: ‘I want you to go out into the world, build a gun for me, kill some monsters, and then bring back treasure, ” Dizon said. “Then, a few hours later, you can check that wallet that’s under there and be like, oh, I got these things back.”

Dizon believes that such automation would greatly reduce the amount of “grinding” required in games – allowing players to jump into the entertaining parts while leaving the boring stuff to the AI.

“I think this is going to be the beginning of a new gaming genre of interacting with AI and not playing games all day,” he said. “You set the parameters for the AI and let it work in the game world.”