Last year saw the rise of the concept of “play-to-earn” in gaming. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it more or less means that, through playing a game relentlessly, you can earn a passive income, usually by collecting in-game tokens or items and then reselling them on an open market or exchange.
Unfortunately, what’s become evident is that the model is broken: no one is playing these games, because these games aren’t fun.
Decentraland – like Second Life, but on the blockchain
If that pitch sounds like it’s straight out of 2017, that’s because Decentraland was launched almost exactly five years ago. But, of course, they’re still building, right? Wrong.
Usership has dwindled to near nothing and the in-game marketplace is dead. Yet the currency associated with the game, MANA, has a market cap of over a billion dollars.
Besides Decentraland’s $26 million ICO back in 2017, Decentraland is also funded by nine venture capital firms, including Digital Currency Group. The suggestion here is that these investors care more about the price of MANA than creating a fun game for users – and the data bears this out.
While Decentraland at its peak has failed to attract more than a few thousand users at a time, trading volume for MANA is in the tens of millions of dollars every day. This currency is being traded on exchanges, not in-game, and isn’t used for much of anything besides speculation.
Second Life, the “web2” rival of…
