Why both players and developers prefer Play-to-Airdrop over Play-to-Earn

Players get the speculative thrill of bigger rewards and designers have more flexibility to balance the game economy when Web3 games award points instead of tokens, writes Corey Wilton, CEO of Mirai Labs.

Web3 games have evolved a lot since their humble beginnings, with richer mechanics, sharper UX, and more complex economic models. But jazzier looks and gaming experience aren’t the only changes taking place. We’re now seeing the beginnings of play-to-airdrop, or “P2A,” where players earn points that they can later exchange for digital assets.

And while the advent of P2A signals an evolution in the fundamental models behind Web3 games, its rapidly growing popularity demonstrates something that has been true about Web3 games from day one: Whether it’s P2E or P2A, speculation has always been the name of the game. But with P2A, game developers have a chance to create Web3 game economies that will remain balanced for the long term.

Corey Wilton is the CEO of Mirai Labs, the international game studio behind games such as Pegaxy, Petopia and Web3 game “SocialFi” infrastructure GuildTech.

How Play-to-Airdrop works

P2A rewards players for the value of the time they play marks rather than in actual tokens (as in P2E). These points are redeemable for tokens that will be issued by the game developer at an unknown time in the future.

Points do not have a market value and do not provide users with any concrete claim to any blockchain-based assets when issued. The idea is that users play to earn potential future rewards. The catch is that they don’t know how many tokens they will receive in return, the price per token, when tokens will be generated, or the settlement schedule.

Therefore, the opportunity for speculation about the future value of points is greater than in traditional P2E – where if you earn 100 tokens over 10 hours of play, you know that they will be available for withdrawal at a given time. While prices may vary, at least you can be sure of how many tokens you will collect in the end.

While the P2E model has been enduringly popular with users, the new mechanic will bring huge benefits to game builders and game economies. As X-user VaderResearch said, “[P2A] rewards are extremely likely – allowing flexibility for developers to balance the economics while achieving virality.”

But how does the P2A mechanism fit into the growing world of Web3 games – and their growing pool of players?

It’s the Money, Money, Money

Since the beginning of P2E, the people who play video games have been divided into two distinct groups along Web2 and Web3 lines. Web2 players were decidedly uninterested in — and even disdainful of — the blockchain elements that many big game studios were beginning to build. To be honest, in the early days Web3 games, with their ultra-basic graphics and mechanics, were practically a joke.

But Web3 players didn’t bat an eye at the rudimentary infrastructure of the P2E games available to them. They were mainly interested in their economic potential.

Nowadays, the lines between Web2 and Web3 games are blurring. Web3 game studios have worked hard to make games more attractive to Web2 players—and have received millions in funding to create blockchain-based games that offer players the quality of experience commonly found in Web2 games.

But while these next-generation Web3 games may eventually attract a more diverse group of users, Web3 players will always come — and stay — for reasons that have nothing to do with how a game looks or feels: they’re motivated by opportunity for speculation and asset acquisition. This is why P2A – although new – has already proven to be popular with the “degen” crowd of gamers.

Adrian Krion, CEO and founder of Berlin-based blockchain gaming startup Spielworks, put it well in a recent article: “It’s true that the thrill of making a profit can add an exciting new element to games.” But while Web3 players still crave a fun experience and a challenging quest, he added, “Earning an NFT is as much about one’s status within the community as it is about earning it in the market .”

So even though Web2 gamers are an increasingly important demographic for Web3 game developers, P2A’s overarching goal is to attract the group most dedicated to Web3 gaming since its inception: the same Web3 crowd that kicked off Web3 gaming’s journey into the mainstream in 2021.

Whether P2A will be more successful than P2E in the long term remains to be seen. It is still so new that its long-term effects on space are not yet known. But one thing seems inevitable – it offers more of what Web3 players are most motivated by: blockchain-based rewards.