Online Gaming Guilds Help Lift 3rd World with Blockchain-Based P2E

The emergence of block-chain based Play-to-Earn (P2E) games has revolutionized the online gaming industry. As the internet’s reach expanded all over the world in the early 2000s, the number of players engaged in online multiplayer role-playing games exploded as bandwidths widened, speeds increased, and technology improved. Back then, the most a player would need to do to begin playing was to buy a subscription. 

New blockchain-based games have turned the business model of these older MMO games on their heads by adopting a Play-to-Earn economic model that rewards users for gaming activity: for accomplishing various tasks, players can earn tokens that can later be exchanged for another cryptocurrency, which can then be cashed out as fiat. Thus, users not only enjoy playing these games, but earn real money at the same time.

But this comes with a catch. As opposed to subscriptions, to enter many of these blockchain-based games, users need to buy non-interchangeable game tokens (NFT), which serve as the currency in the games’ internal economies. As P2E games have grown in popularity, so has the price of these digital coins, which grant rights to certain characters, game items, or space in the metaverse.

For example, to begin playing Axie Infinity, one of the most well-known and popular blockchain-based games, a user must purchase 3 pet characters. An Axie Infinity gaming NFT cost $220 in 2021, so new players needed to shell out about $660 just to start. For many people in Third World countries eager to take advantage of the opportunities P2E games present for earning extra income, this cost is prohibitive.

However, there is a solution: online game guilds.

What are Online Guilds?

Online gaming guilds, or clans, are communities that emerged when multiplayer games first appeared on the internet. Their members join forces to aid each other in completing certain game tasks and defeating stronger players. There are guilds of different kinds and sizes. Some are made up of players who actually know each other in the real world, while others connect thousands of members around the globe. 

Sony Online Entertainment’s game EverQuest, which was released by the American company in 1999, is widely considered to be the birthplace of gaming guilds. As guild members began to actively interact in chat rooms and offline meetings, it became clear that these guilds were more than just groups of players focused on achieving objectives

Today, there are guilds in nearly all popular multiplayer online games, including World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Counterstrike, Roblox, Dungeon, Ragnarok, Lost Ark, RuneScape. Online guilds can give rookies access to the resources they’ll need to overcome key hurdles in the game. In fact, it is largely thanks to their existence that many games that were released 10-15 years ago still exist on the market today. This is because, in addition to helping newbies get up and running faster, these games have become platforms for social interaction, where thousands and even millions of people with shared interests meet to communicate. For example, World of Warcraft sees more than one million active users per day and boasts a total of 117 million players.

Game Guilds in Blockchain-Based Games

With the shift in gaming business models, the role of guilds in online games has also been transformed. Guilds in blockchain-based games are usually organized as decentralized autonomous organizations. They sometimes have their own internal tokens that allow guild members to vote on how to resolve issues that are important to the community. These digital coins are also involved in the economic processes and services that the guild provides to its members. In performing this role, guilds greatly contribute to the internal economies of games in the new P2E environment. 

Roman Goryunov from the Meta DAO Guild explains, “Guilds improve liquidity within the game, contribute new capital, and stimulate player participation. Among the most serious problems that guilds help overcome in multiplayer blockchain games is high entry barriers… Many blockchain game players live in developing countries. For them, these games present an opportunity to earn income and improve their lives, but the high cost of the NFTs required to enter turns out to be an insurmountable barrier for them.” 

Guilds address this problem by allowing new players to rent NFTs if they can’t afford to purchase them. For example, the Meta DAO Guild has a multifunctional platform for blockchain-based game players that offers a rental service where the NFT owner or guild shares the profits from gaming activities with renters, or ‘tenants’. It works in the following way: NFT owners register on the platform and select a player to rent tokens to from a list of players trained by Meta DAO Guild (scholars). The tenant (player) gets access to the gaming NFT without any investment, and the gaming income is divided between the NFT’s owner and the player. 

The Meta DAO Guild guarantees that NFT owners will share profits with players via smart contracts. To ensure this, before renting out an NFT via Metarent, landlords must deposit a certain amount in an account as a guarantee that the tenant will receive their fair share.

New Guild Services

Besides facilitating NFT rentals, guilds may provide a number of other useful services. For example, the Meta DAO Guild also offers a training platform for guild member players named ‘Scholarship’, a platform for exchanging different game NFTs called ‘MetaExchange’, and a decentralized fund for investing in GameFi projects dubbed ‘DAO Launchpad’.

On February 22, Meta DAO Guild’s will hold its first tokensale. After buying the platform’s internal token, MDGG, owners will be able to stake them with the DAO Launchpad venture fund, which means they will have the same opportunities as large investors to invest in NFT games in the projects’ earliest stages. At present, only large investors and venture capital funds generally have the opportunity to reap huge profits by getting in on the ground floor. But, with DAO Launchpad, ordinary people can buy GameFi project tokens before sales open to the public. These community members can also purchase the project’s gaming NFTs and take part in the game’s alpha and beta testing stage, to name a couple of other benefits.

Role of Venture Capitalists

Large venture capital funds have taken an interest in guilds due to their new role in the economies of blockchain-based games. Over the past six months, a number of notable venture capital investments have been made in gaming guilds:  

• To support GameFi guilds, a Guild Accelerator Program with a support fund of $30 million was launched by Venture accelerator Brinc and Animoca Brands, which operates NFT games. 
• Yield Guild Games, which focuses on popularizing P2P games and training new players in Southeast Asia, mainly in the Philippines, received $4.6 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital fund, and a group of other investors.
• Animoca Brands and Three Arrows Capital have invested a total of $18 million in the Avocado Guild.

Arianna Simpson, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explained “The intersection of cryptocurrencies and gaming is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing areas in the technology sector.” This is because, in blockchain-based games, “value is concentrated in the hands of players and the community, not gaming platforms,” she added.

Of course, the main concern of venture capitalists is to make a return on their investments. As liquidity in games grows and the number of players rises, investing in gaming guilds is becoming very attractive, since the cost of their tokens will surely rise.

However, the main focus for blockchain-based gaming guilds is still helping out ordinary players, who are the engine that is driving this new market forward. One of the fastest-growing demographics in gaming today is players from the developing world. In fact, the top 6 entries in ActivePlayer.io’s latest Axie Infinity Live Player Count are all developing countries, except for the US, which ranks third. An Axie Infinity player who goes by Saharan-sub tweeted that Axie Infinity players in Ghana can make more money playing the game than working for the country’s minimum wage. By playing Axie Infinity on a regular basis, Ghanaian players can earn from $140 to $420 per month, while the minimum wage is only at $41 per month. 

Now, with the help of these guilds, new players from developing countries can fully take part in the gaming industry and earn thousands of digital gaming coins, not to mention welcome income, regardless of their economic circumstances.