How do you get your grandmother to play a crypto game?

Paul “The Profit” Dawalibi is a man who wears many hats. If you check out his LinkedIn profile, you will see he is the CEO of Holodeck Ventures, host of CNBC Arabia's game changers, author of Metaverse Dreams, and “the biggest gaming industry influencer and most sought after gaming expert advisor in the GCC”, and last but not least, “the most electrifying man in gaming”.

A hardcore gamer, he spotted the business case for gaming many years ago, and how crypto could change the equation around the economics of games. “Whether it was how you financed your game, so instead of selling equity in your gaming studio, you’re selling tokens, right? It was a way to potentially finance a game, but also try and change the economics for the player.”

He added: “Maybe now you could play and you could earn money while you're playing. Maybe now you're playing and you could own the thing that you earned in the game, as opposed to it being some asset that you can't sell anywhere. So crypto really attacked gaming from an economic standpoint.”

Dawalibi feels we are currently at an inflection point where crypto and blockchain are still figuring out how they integrate with gaming, without taking away from the fun of the game, but making the experience better for the player.

Axie Infinity is viewed as the poster child for token-earning gaming, although its player base hasn’t seen any significant growth. A worthwhile successor to Axie Infinity hasn’t yet emerged.

“I think the argument I hear often is, 'Well, games are hard to make', which is true, they're expensive to make, and they take time, also true. Games sometimes can take five years, six years, seven years, to make. And so the argument is a strong one that we're not there yet because we haven't had enough time to make a great crypto game or blockchain game.”

At the same time, gamers themselves don’t seem to be massively incentivized to play such games. “The gamer fundamentally doesn't care what the technologies are. It's about the benefits. Is the game fun? Do I want to come back and play? Do I want to tell my friends about it?”

“Success in crypto gaming could be defined as playing a game without talking about crypto or knowing it is involved. That will be the big breakthrough.” Dawalibi compared crypto users (about 500 million) to the three billion people who consider themselves gamers. “So that's the gold mine. That's what we need to be getting to. How do you get my grandmother, who plays Candy Crush, to pick up a crypto game and just play it because it passes the time for her, and it's a fun game?”

“It takes just one breakthrough hit. It takes one Fortnite to radically transform this entire segment of the industry.”

 

Listen to the whole interview on The Crypto Radio's live player or in our Crypto Culture podcast.