What Are Play-to-Earn Games? How Players Are Making A Living With NFTs

When anonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin in January of 2009, nobody knew how impactful cryptocurrency would become. While rumors regarding its potential floated about, cryptocurrency changing the world was just a far-off pipe dream. Today, it’s all coming true, and what started as an experimental payment system for the techiest of the techies is disrupting industries worldwide; gaming included.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise that digital currency and digital worlds go together – cryptocurrency fits gaming like a glove. With the help of related blockchain technologies like NFTs, cryptocurrencies make peer-to-peer virtual worlds possible, empowering gamers through true ownership of the games that they play.

How Players Are Making A Living With NFTs

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are blockchain records that prove ownership of unique digital items like pictures. When applied to gaming, NFTs can represent in-game equipment, characters, structures, and more. In games that incorporate cryptocurrencies and NFTs, players can generate an income either by earning cryptocurrency directly or by earning NFTs and trading them for cryptocurrency. As such, these games are commonly referred to as “Play-to-Earn”.

Play-to-Earn games come in one of two forms. Some, like the ever famous Axie Infinity, are stand-alone, meaning that they are bound to their own self-contained game world. Others, like the hotly anticipated Runiverse, span across several wide-scale cryptocurrency gaming platforms called metaverses.

The word “metaverse” comes from “meta” for “beyond” and “verse” for “universe”. Effectively, metaverses are interactive virtual worlds where players can socially experience independently-created games and events. Currently, the best-known metaverses are Decentraland and The Sandbox, both of which are quickly being populated by major companies like Atari and Adidas.

Soon to be present in both The Sandbox and Decentraland, along with their own metaverse, Runiverse is set to be the first cross-metaverse play-to-earn game where players can challenge others based on the performance of the crypto market.

In Runiverse, players pick a token from their cryptocurrency wallet and place a wager before facing off in thirty-second one-vs-one races where the speed of their runner depends on the live price action of their chosen token. Players whose token rises by the highest percentage during that time frame will see their runner sprint ahead of the competition to win them the race and their opponent’s wagered crypto.

Runiverse is part of Elite Mobile ($ELITE), a cryptocurrency system created for the world of mobile industry, designed to support influencers, NFTs, metaverses, and play-to-earn gaming in one place. Runiverse is Elite Mobile’s first foray into cryptocurrency gaming, and aims to create a gamified ecosystem that will benefit gamers both within the Elite Mobile community and the countless metaverses abroad.

The benefits that Runiverse delivers players goes even beyond earning cryptocurrency through races. Players can also buy and sell NFT tracks that automatically host competitions and send a 6% share of all winnings directly to their owners, earning them real passive income. For gamers looking to get started, the Runiverse Demo can be played directly from Runiverse’s official website. All players need to do to get started is connect their Metamask wallet and either invite a friend or challenge a random player.