The hottest new trend in the cryptocurrency industry - GameFi - operates on a play-to-earn model. Earnings from games can be very effective. But not everyone is a fan of it.
One of them is Dash Huang - CEO of TapTap, a popular Chinese game distribution platform, who believes that current Play-to-Earn games on blockchain are essentially gambling and Ponzi schemes.
TapTap CEO is not a Play-to-Earn fan
Unlike traditional games, players of some blockchain-powered games receive financial rewards for completing certain tasks. While GameFi's origins can be traced back to 2017, it wasn't until the pandemic that shook things up and fostered the development of blockchain-based monetization of the gaming experience.
Although in its infancy, several players have managed to generate serious income as well as earn passive in-game income. In fact, the play-to-earn phenomenon took off with NFT-based online video games like Axie Infinity.
This animated-animated-training “play-to-earn” metaverse video game developed by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis has been a gamechanger for some people in the Philippines who have been hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic. In Venezuela, struck by hyperinflation, many individuals earn their living by playing the video game powered by cryptocurrencies.
But, according to the TapTap executive, blockchain is suitable for gambling, and play-to-earn is more like Ponzi schemes for gullible individual investors.
China warns against play-to-earn games
Beijing doesn't like cryptocurrencies and everything related to them. Further validating this hawkish stance towards the industry, a Chinese state television has issued a warning to citizens against participating in blockchain-based, play-to-earn online simulation games such as Farmers World.
China Central Television (CCTV) called these games "scams" after filing reports from two intermediaries in Shaanxi and Fujian, allowing Chinese citizens to engage in play-to-earn games.
CCTV has claimed that these games have a low budget for web pages and cheat players. He also went on to cite industry experts who compared the mechanism to that of a Ponzi scheme.
Despite China's aversion to anything remote related to cryptocurrencies, the country has an entirely different stance on the Metaverse. So much so that it also unveiled the nation's first metaverse industry group, called - the Metaverse Industry Committee, under the state-supervised China Mobile Communications Association (CMCA) in November.
