Regardless of the pessimistic attitude towards the future of P2E games, there are some projects that manage to thrive and find ways to keep an active audience. Farming simulator CropBytes in one such examples.
“We’re not just a farming simulator, we’re a business farming simulator”, pointed out CropBytes co-founder Sheryl Varghese during Cointelegraph’s AMA live session. “We give people real jobs with real income which, for example, supported many users during the pandemic. The in-game exchange allows people to invest and grow their portfolio. And people continue to stay with us — gamers, traders, investors. Some have even been with us since we started, almost 5 years running.”
When asked how they managed to build such a loyal audience and continue to develop the game for the long term, CEO Sandeep Kumar and co-founder Sheryl Varghese touched on a number of points.
“I believe that Cropbytes’ right mix of fungible assets and NFTs has strengthened the game economy along with the player community and helped us weather different market cycles”, said Varghese. “We implemented this balanced mix in 2019. Prior to that we had been just like others, an NFT-only game. But the 2018 bull market made us rethink the project.
Recently, we also listed our game assets as SFTs on Polygon.. To a novice player, SFTs may not make sense and look similar to NFTs, but they certainly bring liquidity to the game exchange. They also make playing easier, especially if a user wants to buy multiple assets at once," said Varghese.
According to Kumar, Cropbytes is easy to play for users of all levels of game experience. "A player is free to explore the game and learn the mechanics, which are not too complicated, during the weekly trial period. You can be a farmer, do tasks for other users, trade on the game exchange, or be an investor, and choose the behavior that suits you best. It’s a business strategy game: you can start from scratch and build your own strategy.”
Fun has the same priority in the game as developing business skills. “We have plenty of mini-games, for instance, fishing. Among other entertainment options are daily tournaments among users or taking care of digital pets. We have always focused on keeping the gameplay fun while working on a strong economy. And that’s how we’ve built our beautiful community”, added Varghese.
Talking about the game token CBX, Kumar noted that the core of the CropBytes’ ecosystem, is a deflationary token, "We have adopted the deflationary protocol from the mining pattern of Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, the CBX supply decreases and mining difficulty increases over time.
Both Kumar and Varghese are positive about the future of the metaverse and P2E gaming. While Varghese spoke of the metaverse’s potential to revolutionize various industries, not just gaming or workforce, Kumar has his own point of view.
"There's a slight decline now," he agreed. "One of the problems, in my opinion, is that we're still in the middle of the GameFi learning curve, and it will take some time for us to adjust. However, these games and NFTs have the ability to survive, as previous market downturns have shown us. We're going to see a lot of new games and more big studios coming out with successful tools in these areas.”
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