Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Firmly Stands by Play-to-Earn Gaming Model

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian firmly believes that play-to-earn is the future of gaming despite the decline in popularity of some major P2E games.

In a recent Twitter thread, Ohanian, who is the founder and current General Partner of Web3-focused venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, said play-to-earn “will become standard for video games in the future.”

“Within the next five years, the majority of gamers won’t play games unless they are being properly valued for that time.”

Despite the failure of play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity, Ohanian remains convinced that such games are the future of the gaming industry. 

He sees the fall of Axie Infinity as a temporary setback, claiming that as crypto and NFT trading technologies scale, play-to-earn games will become a no-brainer.

Ohanian cited the six-figure sale of a virtual nightclub (Club Neverdie) in the early 2000s game Entropia Universe, plus more recent six-figure sales of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) skins, as reasons why he believes the P2E concept will make a comeback. 

“With recent advances in Web3, there are even more ways for players to be compensated for something they’ve already been doing for free for years,” he added. 

While there are certainly challenges ahead for play-to-earn gaming, Ohanian remains convinced that as the wider public becomes more familiar with crypto and NFT trading, the model will become much more widely accepted.

Ohanian is an investor in several gaming companies, including Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis, and he has been an ardent supporter of crypto-field video games. 

Earlier this year, in the midst of all pessimism around the future of the crypto industry, Ohanian said crypto, and Bitcoin in particular, is here to stay despite the recent unfortunate developments in the industry, including the collapse of FTX.

At the time, he compared the advent of blockchain to the creation of paper, saying that we would start to see more and more applications for this technology that would “compound in value and utility” over the years.

Other Crypto Veterans Argue P2E is Not Sustainable

Ohanian’s belief in the future of play-to-earn gaming stands in contrast to the views of many other crypto executives and game developers, who argue that the model is not sustainable.

As reported, Azra Games founder and CEO Mark Otero has expressed skepticism regarding the viability of the concept of play-to-earn. 

Instead, he said Web3 games need to be so good that people adopt it for the gameplay, not for NFTs or its in-game tokens. 

Otero added that the Web3 elements of a game should reveal themselves only after players “fall in love” with it, enhancing the user experience and bringing additional value to the game.