OP Games has announced its ambition to support, launch and host up to 500 play-to-earn games by the end of 2022. Their main hub will be OP Arcade, and their first in-house developed NFT project Arcadians will launch on October 19th. They’ve received $8.6 million in venture capital funding from Polygon Studios, Bitcoin.com and many more investment firms.
OP Games is building a multi-chain gaming platform using Ethereum and NEAR Protocol. It’s their goal to build a gaming ecosystem with community-owned games. They will use NFTs and DAOs for that. Ultimately they want to lower the barrier for ownership, helping developers to monetize their works via patronage, DeFi systems and of course play-to-earn mechanics.
Considering that OP Games will have 500 games within a year, you can imagine that these aren’t all full-fledged open-world role playing games. It’s better to think about web games, and not see each of those 500 games as AAA gaming experiences. OP Arcade features HTML5 games with tournaments, prizes and a crypto economy. Arcadians – their genesis NFT collection – will become one of the pillars of the OP Arcade platform.
In some way we can probably compare OP Arcade with for example Gamee or Arc8. Both are projects featuring a wide offering of smaller games, connected through an ecosystem where NFTs and crypto tokens play a role. Play-to-earn can be based on high-scores, time spent in a game or perhaps battles between players.
What is Play-to-Earn?
The Play-to-Earn business model is the latest development in the games industry. It’s a business model that embraces the concept of an open economy and also provides financial benefits to all players who add value by contributing to the game world. Therefore it’s likely to introduce new game concepts and retention models not yet seen in modern gaming.
Giving gamers ownership over in-game assets and allowing them to increase their value by actively playing the game are key components of the play-to-earn business model. By participating in the in-game economy, players are creating value for other players and the developers. In turn they are rewarded with in-game assets. These digital assets can be anything ranging from cryptocurrencies to in-game resources that are tokenized on the blockchain. That’s why the play-to-earn business model goes very well together with blockchain games.
