How Tap-To-Earn Is Advancing Web3 Gaming

It's game five week here at Coindesk, sponsored by Cain where we take a deep dive into the past, the present and future of Web three gaming. Our next guest says play to earn is dead while tap to earn is thriving to ecosystem lead. Elena Schmal joins us. Now, Elena, how's it going? Hey, Jen, everything is amazing. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. Yeah. Well, we've been talking about Web Three gaming all week. It is one of my favorite topics. So let's talk about the concept of play to earn because that is really what got people interested in web three gaming. It's really what made web three gaming steal some of those headlines back a few years ago. Tell me a little bit about that journey for folks who might not have been following it and how we've ended up here where ultimately the business model hasn't really worked out. Yeah, look. So I think like um Plato was probably the first proper manifestation of the game five vertical as such, right? So we all heard about X Infinity and their like rising success and then unfortunately drop. But the thing that uh this first manifestation of play to earn brought to us was definitely the true ownership of game assets that players were finally ready to embrace, right? And then definitely all those amazing opportunities to earn while playing through very simple actions. But the problem with uh play to earn was definitely like high barrier to enter and then the um lacking sustainability of those models so later, right? Um And so now we can see the entire new narrative of tap to earn about which exactly I'm I'm writing in the article in the open ad. Um So yeah, and this new narrative just brought us an opportunity to offer something very simple, very engaging and very appealing to the masses and specifically to web two masses, which is very, very important. And the thing that I keep on highlighting just because if we really want to achieve mass adoption in gaming in web three gaming, we need to focus on the web two audience, obviously what makes tap to earn different than play to earn. Um So I would say the openness once again, very low barriers to enter just because you don't have, you don't need to have any money on your account, right? You just open the mini app, you start tapping or like getting engaged in different elements of the gameplay and then you get an airdrop from the team as simple as that. And we saw it in the case of not one that basically airdrop, air dropped, uh, almost 90% of the token supply to the community. And so the average check, the average airdrop per wallet amounted to, I think $200 per wallet. Like, wow, that, that's a great sum. You know, without any need to get involved into anything super complex into any defi stuff. You were just, I mean, having fun playing a game with your friends. This is exactly the difference. Well, let's talk a little bit more about these player acquisition strategies that have been popping up as of late. There have been a lot of play to airdrops. There have been a lot of airdrops happening. Um Do you think that they are working and are these uh new ways of getting players to play your game sustainable or are we attracting people who really are just looking for those air jobs really looking to make a quick buck and then maybe they don't really stay around in the game ecosystem for as long as a game developer or game publisher might like, look, this is a very good question, a question that I'm asking myself every single day when I talk to teams and when I work with Don projects specifically, I think definitely time will show and we're still very early to, you know, uh talk about it like uh with 100% um confidence why? Just because those games have just appeared, right? So the not coin case appeared in January of this year, like properly appeared with already those engaging tasks and like millions of people joining the game every day. Ka, they launched almost um almost in January as well, I think. And now reaching like more than 23 million uh total users, which is wow, an amazing number and cat by is not a chapter that's play to earn or rather a play to air drop. Uh which is also a thing that, that you highlighted, right? So I think it's still quite early, it's definitely easy to get those like masses of users. Just because once again, the gameplay is super simple, it's engaging, you can play with friends, you can get engaged as community, right? Not just as an individual, which makes it even more fun and even greater. Um So you just go through those simple tasks, like for example, in the hamster combat, you become the ceo of a crypto exchange and then you develop your exchange and you invite friends and then you try to find like new shr new codes, new daily combos, which is, I mean, definitely engaging. And for me personally, because I do play this game every single day. So um once again, those apps tend to become viral, which means that marketing costs for them are super, super low and they find a lot of synergy with similar projects with the earns in the Tonico system, which makes it even easier to get new audience, right. So they are basically uh growing super fast. But then what happens then is a very good question. So judging from the case of no corn, we can see that the team has a very advanced, very in depth road map. So they want to continue uh launching games, acting as a publisher as a gaming platform where like external des will be able to come and launch something exciting as well or they will continue to, to create something, something fun. Uh because they have a lot of expertise and experience. And in that of course, then talking about cat, for example, they also want to continue launching games just because they have a lot of experience in wechat, which I think is definitely an ingredient of success uh for for cat as as such. Um talk about, I want to talk about that a little bit, right? Because we have platforms like uh telegram, which is more common, I think to you in North America, it's like easier for North American audience to understand. But then we have wechat, which is really predominant in the Asian markets and we're seeing games and ecosystems pop up on these platforms is is that the catalyst that is maybe going to bring web three games to the masses. Um Instead of some of the other catalysts that we've heard before, I'm curious to hear your thoughts there 100% I would say this is one of the major factors of course, just because so if we take to as a web through ecosystem, the unique differentiation that we have is this amazing and large distribution channel, right? So just as let's say, Wechat offers an opportunity for external debt to come build something and tap into those. I mean large, super large numbers. By the same token, Telegram offers that opportunity to us as a as a web three ecosystem to come build and try to attract those 900 million monthly active users that Telegram boasts. So answering your question, yes, this is, this is one of the major differences and unique things that we're currently working on. Now. I want to talk about bringing Web two audience over to web three. That's something you mentioned a little bit earlier. But when we're talking about the gameplay, you know, in hamster combat, becoming the CEO of a crypto exchange, and we're talking about play to airdrop campaigns and airdrops. These are very crypt native narratives. So I'm curious to hear if you've been able to differentiate who's come over to play um Anton ecosystem games from Web two or why you think a web two audience might be interested in these very crypto native narratives and themes? Yeah. So you're absolutely right that this web three elements, let's say are um more or less inherent into the gameplay, right? But I wouldn't call them major elements of the gameplay. Yes, you do become the CEO of an exchange, but it doesn't really change the entire picture. Um The hook here is that it's super simple. You just open the app like, I mean, you're most probably invited by a friend. You start tapping on a hamster and then opening those cards. You don't even need to actually read what's on that, those cards. But this is definitely one of the goals of the team to try to on board people into crypto, right. Step by step by showing them what's happening in our world, which is so different from, from the world our parents or like normal friends live in. Right? So I would say a mission of all those teams also is definitely education. And so like answering your question, yes, it is hard to on board back to people in any way. But those teams, they appear to have found a way to do it. Once again, we will see in the long term, how effective and efficient this this approach is. Uh but I would say we're definitely on the right track and take cat, for example. I mean, they don't mention too, too many elements in the gameplay. It's just about like um breeding, growing your cat and everyone loves cats, of course. So it's very like emotional touch to the game that I think is also very important ingredient. So there are multiple ways in which we can show people that crypto is actually friendly and open to anyone. We just need to experiment with new ways of doing it. I want to come back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the interview and that was play to earn. Uh and as anyone who is following it knows when play to earn, uh started taking over headlines. It was really in the Philippines and developing nations when people were home during COVID and they started to find the source of income that in, in many areas was more than you could make in a minimum wage job in those in those areas. Um Is there any indication of what kind of audience, uh what region they're from in the world is taking up tap to earn? Like, do we have any more information on the gamers who are playing? Um and the gamers who are making these games go viral. Um Totally, I would say it's more or less the same, it's emerging markets and this is the beauty of it, right? Because definitely crypto and rater is all about democratization of different opportunities and specifically like, I mean, earn opportunities, of course, just because those people in emerging markets, they don't have um the same, let's say, level of opportunity um as as we do in like developed countries, right? So um judging from the stats that we get from teams such markets as, for example, Southeast Asia and then Asia in general and then Iran, for example, and then the CIS region, those are the strongest geographies. I would say of those tap to earn games and to earn games and play to airdrop games and even mid core games, right? So we have one game Gatto, which is a mid core game built on to. So they also um they also get a lot of audience from Iran. This is not very um I mean, well paying audience, I would say so it it's very hard to monetize that yet, probably they'll find ways. But um in brief, these are emerging markets, people from emerging markets that are mostly interested in this very simple opportunities to, to earn and then to get engaged into something exciting. This is such an interesting point for me because the promise of crypto was to democratize finance, right? And in many parts of the crypto ecosystem, I think right now, we are replicating some of the problems, the challenges that we're trying to solve with crypto. But it sounds like web three gaming could be part of the solution. Uh Part of that democratization that maybe is being left out of the conversation. I'm curious to hear your thoughts there. Um I mean, look totally uh I believe that gaming is probably one of the verticals that is going to bring like a lot of people if we do everything, right? Um That's what happened to wechat. Once again, they don't have this narrative of democratizing everything we do and we need to tap into it, of course, but look, one third of wechat users play games, play mini games, that's hyper casual games that are super simple to play and to embrace. Um So we should definitely like aim there and you're totally right that we should democratize finance and then um all the other principles on which our society is built on, we can make an impact here. Elena, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me. Like I said, I could talk about web through gaming all day if anyone wants to read, uh Elena's article that is on coindesk.com and make sure you read all the articles and watch all of our videos that we'll be publishing for game five week this week. Thanks Elena. Thank you, Jen.