How To Make Money Investing In Crypto Games – So many people are saying crypto gaming is the investment opportunity of a lifetime. It is even being compared when Bitcoin was as low as a hundred dollars a coin. So I thought I’d do some research and find out what’s going on.
And I have to admit I was pretty blown away. By now we’ve probably all heard the stories of teams making millions from NFTs and personally, I think it’s safe to say I was a little bit sceptical of people selling these pointless JPEG images for such high prices.
I mean like those crypto punks have been selling for up to $11 million dollars each, however, by looking into crypto gaming this is really started to make sense as it could be the use case for an NFT.
As I learned about crypto gaming, the more I could see it being the next logical progression for the gaming industry, which is currently worth $180 billion dollars.
So today let’s discuss this new investment opportunity, and how to get in on the ground floor. And I’ll round up everything with my thoughts as a traditional investor.
How amazing would it be to log onto your favourite game and actually make money while you’re playing it? I’m not talking about being a professional gamer or streamer.
All you’d have to do is have fun playing the game. At first, this sounds a little bit crazy, but in crypto games, we’ll have this play-to-earn feature integrated into them, which makes it easy to see why they would quickly become very popular.
But Mark, gaming offers no value to society, how could you possibly be paid for doing it? Well, let me explain, The game; Fortnite has generated nearly $10 billion dollars with in-game purchases over the last few years, they do this by selling rare skins and items, which are all stuck within the game itself.
So those items have no value unless you’re playing Fortnite. The introduction of the battle pass helped achieve these crazy revenue numbers. You buy the battle pass, and then as you progress, you unlock skins and other exclusive content.
But what if you could actually take those items and sell them in the real world and even make a profit? Well, that’s going to be possible in crypto games. As the items will be all NFT and the gold you collect will be its own cryptocurrency with real-world value.
By having creative uses for these digital assets inside the games, it creates the demand for the items and an in-game economy. Just imagine the possibilities you could be playing Sims and buying an NFT of a sofa to put in your digital house or playing World of Warcraft and earning real money for every gold coin you collect.
This is a long way off from happening with the big games. However, you may start seeing this concept popping up in many indie games, but not all of them are going to be successful in my opinion.
First and foremost, the game has to be fun to play.
It’s all very well having this play-to-earn feature. But if the game isn’t enjoyable, then a demand for the coins and the NFTs will of course be a lot lower. On the other hand, a game could lay dormant for a while, but if it’s extremely addictive, then it might get adopted on a huge scale, which will cause the value of its crypto coins and NFTs to go, you’ve guessed it, to the moon.
It’s a bit like when people first started to get interested in Bitcoin, as there was more demand, the price starts to increase dramatically.
The creation of crypto games is so exciting. It’s an estimated 3.24 billion gamers. Just imagine if they all wanted crypto and NFTs without even knowing it, but I’m an investor, not a gamer.
Why does any of this matter to me? Well, now we understand how crypto games work.
Imagine you were able to spot them before they became popular and invested in their NFTs and coins. That kind of explosive growth could make you a lot of money; like with anything, it’s usually the people that get in at the start of these things that make the real profits.
So now the question is, how do you actually find these up-and-coming games before it’s too late?
Well, I actually believe this is where the younger generation has an advantage over the boomers. Most of them are growing up playing games and can sense whether a game will be popular or not.
But having this intuition only gets you so far. It’s also important to do your research. My favourite game as a kid was Space Invaders. Well, that’s until Defender came out, which was the first horizontal game that I ever played.
These are both very iconic now, but it just proves how far things have progressed in such a short amount of time. It’s such a fast-moving industry.
During my research, I’ve actually found, that there are three key areas that if looked into can give you a huge advantage over other investors.
Number One Is The People Behind The Game.
Who would you rather have on your football team, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Steve from the local club? Of course, Steve would be great for a beer down the bar afterwards, but Ronaldo would much more likely help you win the game.
When it comes to crypto games, it’s the exact same idea. You want a team that has extensive experience and has worked on big games in the past. This way you know, they’re able to follow through on their promises as they’ve got a proven skillset.
The last thing you want to do is invest your money only to find out the game developers are clueless and faking it until they make it. If you pick the Ronaldo scenario, these types of teams know exactly what goes into creating a good game and how long it takes to get everything up and running.
This means they usually have much more achievable aims and a one to two-year launch strategy, which allows them to get player feedback much faster. The problem I often find with new business owners is that they’re trying to do too much too soon.
As they don’t realize their limits. I’ve seen many of my friends go into business. And most of them don’t last very long as they take this approach, which leads to burnout. They were unable to hit the high targets they set themselves on such harsh deadlines.
I can imagine this being very similar to new game developers trying to create a game that has everything. These kinds of projects are very unlikely to get completed, or if they do, then everything is just mediocre.
Even big companies take years to produce games like Grand Theft Auto. So it just isn’t possible with teams as small, as 10 to 30 people in a reasonable timeframe. It seems to me that the most successful indie games are the ones that have a very basic journey a lot like the game rocket league
The Second Area To Look Into Is Graphic Design.
This is easy to forget when you’re looking at games from an investor’s point of view; at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the game is actually any good, because first of all, people have to be intrigued to try it out.
This means marketing is extremely important. You could have the best product in the world, but if no one knows you’ve got it, you won’t sell anything. Even investing apps now need to compete and look appealing for people to use them.
The truth is people really do judge a book by its cover. So in order for a game to really take off, the visuals need to be really beautiful. Especially when considering these indie games don’t have a huge marketing budget and are relying on word of mouth and social media to spread the message for them.
The Third Area To Consider Is Potential Scams As This Is A Very New Industry And These Are Everywhere.
It reminds me very much of the dawn of the internet and the .com bubble. Everyone was so excited as they thought the internet was the future.
And of course, as it turned out they were correct. However, there were a lot of poor investments mixed in with the good ones. I remember when the.com bubble burst and people realize most of the companies they were investing in were worthless and nothing more than fancy to name names.
There has to be more to a game than just a name and a few NFTs. That’s why even if you do believe crypto gaming isn’t the next big thing. You should always be aware that where there are opportunities.
There are always scams.
It’s a bit like the story of the emperor’s new clothes. A swindler tells the emperor that he can make him some magical clothes that will appear invisible to anyone who is stupid or incompetent.
The emperor pays the man a huge amount of money to make the clothes and the swindler pretends to weave without any needles or threads. No one wants to admit they can’t see the clothes, not even the emperor himself, as it would mean admitting to looking silly.
So he wears them on a parade around his kingdom. It’s not until the child pointed out that everyone realizes they’ve been tricked, now being an emperor sounds nice, but you certainly want to avoid being like this emperor at all costs by understanding as much as possible about the industry before you part with your hard-earned money.
As crypto gaming is so new, it’s easy for scammers to pretend to be making a game when actually all they’re doing is buying a demo pack, copying any existing game and selling their NFTs for thousands based on nothing but hype. All it takes is for some kid to come along and notice how bad the game is. And then the party’s over, the illusion is broken.
I’ve always only invested in things that I understand. And it’s been a great strategy over the years, but that’s not to say I’m not open to new ideas.
You have to be extra careful. However, the rewards can be much greater. After doing my research. I believe the next shot at huge returns will come from crypto games.
