Free to Play Gaming
In the last decade there has been an increase in free to play games. These are game titles that can be downloaded and played at no cost for the player, but often in free to play games there are other mechanisms such as extra in-game content and ads that are monetized in the game. In short, free to play games are getting more popular and in this blog post we will take a closer look at why that is.
History of Free to Play.
The free to play business model in online games was created by Nexon in Korea. The first game to use it was Nexon's QuizQuiz, released in October 1999, and made by Lee Seungchan, also known as the creator of the massively popular game maple story.This game was released in 2005 and gained popularity fast. It was free to play so how did they make money? Well that isn’t a hard question to answer. They monetized the game by letting players buy in-game pets, consumables, clothing, armor and even tickets to get rare weapons. But Maple story isn’t the only title that is free to play. In the last decade a lot of free to play games with massive player bases have arised think about some of these popular titles: Valorant, League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, World of Tanks and many more.
Benefits of Free to Play.
One of the primary benefits of free to play games is the accessibility, for most of these games you don't need expensive hardware to play and compete. The only thing you need is to be connected to the internet to be able to download the games. This means that the player doesn’t have to invest a lot of money to enjoy the game.
A second benefit is that most of these games are played online and heavily rely on the social aspect of the game. This means that the player can make new friends and is more likely to stay because there is a sense of community. This is mostly important for younger and older players who might be more socially isolated due to circumstances.
Another benefit of social games is that they are more likely to stay up-to-date. Because free to play games are monetized through in-game purchases, the developers of these titles have an incentive to keep pushing fresh and new content frequently to keep the game alive and the community happy.
What makes crypto free to play games different?
The big difference between the traditional free to play game and the crypto free to play games is that you can spend money but also have an opportunity to make a profit or get your money back when you are done with the game.
Because the crypto-games are built on a token that can be used as an in-game currency this gives it the possibility to also cash the token out when you are finished. How is that possible? Well it is quite simple all the items in the game are NFTs when a player acquires a NFT it is theirs. The game does not own it the player does and he can do with the NFT what he wants he can place it in his virtual home or trade it with another player for the currency in-game that he later can cash out when he sells the token from his wallet.
We do think that free to play games on the block-chain and with NFTs are the future! Giving more agency to the players to make decisions about what they do with the items acquired in game. This in turn also makes for a fairer market in which corporations don’t hold a strangeling power over the playerbase.
