The GameFi industry has always been a hub for innovation. This time, charity is the focus. While the growing sector has provided income streams for its player base, the emphasis on giving back via nonprofit drives deserves mention, especially in a world where players are given options to achieve their goals.
Tatsuya Kohrogi, the CSO at DEA, explains further.
E-Crypto News:
Please can you tell us about Impact NFTs on PlayMining?
Impact NFTs are a new kind of social good utility NFT on the PlayMining GameFi platform. When an Impact NFT is used in a PlayMining game, a percentage of the DEAPcoin cryptocurrency tokens the player earns is donated to charity. Our first use case is an Impact NFT for our game ‘Lucky Farmer’ that will make regular DEAPcoin donations over a six-month period from May to October to support a struggling banana farmer and his surrounding community in an impoverished region in the Philippines. In short, Impact NFTs let people make a dramatic difference in the lives of others just by playing a game, which is a first for the industry and we hope it’s something that will catch on.
E-Crypto News:
How can young people’s energy be used profitably and charitably?
Through GameFi! By playing games with Impact NFTs, young people can be both profitable and charitable at the same time. They could also help others get started in the GameFi scene by investing in a Play-&-Earn (P&E) NFT and then lending them out to a scholar on a scholarship system. The scholarship system gives new players a way to get started playing with no upfront investments. The investors lend NFTs to players (the scholars) for use in P&E games, and earnings from the games are shared between the player and the owner of the NFT. Many P&E game NFTs are quite affordable nowadays, so this is becoming more and more feasible for many young people around the world. Young people can actively connect with gamers or communities that they would like to help using this token incentive model.
E-Crypto News:
How has the Web3 space created opportunities for Gen Z to make an impact without the ability to earn?
Many Web3 platforms reward their users for participation or content creation. This is most apparent in Web3 social media projects and P&E gaming, where young people can earn cryptocurrency for doing activities that they were previously doing for free. This is empowering, as it creates wealth for people who previously had little, without any extra effort.
Web3 is also ideal for integration with social good causes. The transparent and trustless nature of blockchain technology is a perfect fit for projects that are allocating funds to charities, for example. Smart contracts can be programmed in such a way that the end user can know without any doubt that their actions will be of high value—in this case that their donation will go to the proper end user charity. There are many other instances of blockchain being used for social good, too. Web3 is undeniably creating many amazing opportunities around the world, and DEA is committed to championing GameFi as a means of creating social good.
E-Crypto News:
Please tell us about the five P2E games on the PlayMining platform.
Job Tribes is a card battle RPG game, and is the most popular one on our platform. It features colorful trading card NFTs with great art and easy to learn strategy card battles. More than 10,000 scholars have earned over US$4.7 million playing Job Tribes since December 2021.
Cookin’ Burger is a multi-tasking action game in which players take on the role of a burger shop worker, taking orders and serving up meals as efficiently as possible.
Menya Dragon Ramen takes the cooking RPG experience to another level, requiring players to manage staff of a ramen shop, who also have to go down into dungeons to fight monsters for rare soup ingredients.
Graffiti Racer is a coloring and racing game in which players color their own NFT avatars and then race them on a track in multiplayer tournaments.
Lucky Farmer is a coin pusher game which features a slot machine, coin pusher and bingo game elements, combined with a cute farming theme including crops and pets that provide special abilities.
We also have a sixth game, Lost Archive +, which will be launching soon. It’s a deck building game like Job Tribes that also features strategic placement board game elements and a fantasy/science fiction-themed setting.
More games are in development, scheduled to launch later this year.
E-Crypto News:
How has the adoption of DEAPCoin created opportunities for gamers?
All PlayMining games offer players a chance to earn DEAPcoin cryptocurrency tokens through play. DEAPcoin can be spent on the PlayMining NFT marketplaces to purchase utility NFTs that increase the players’ ability to earn further DEAPcoin. Our token can also be easily traded with fiat on popular exchanges such as OKX, Gate.io, Uniswap, Bitmart and Bitrue. Also surprisingly, not just gamers but non-gamers have adopted our P&E games as a new source of income. Investors have created their own gaming guilds, creating new jobs and opportunities for their communities, families and friends. We see blockchain gaming and P&E games as a great opportunity for solving real world issues and bringing benefits to not only gamers but also to investors, players, corporations and organizations. We are also continuously exploring new ways to use DEAPcoin as a P&E incentive to create other new opportunities, such as those created by our Impact NFTs. Expect more use cases of GameFi-incentivized social impact and real world application of gaming from us going forward!
E-Crypto News:
What are the next phases of growth for DEAPCoin?
The next phases will be in three parts:
Web3 Gaming Business: We will continue developing first-party and third-party games on our PlayMining platform.
Web3 Social Good Business: Real world applications for gaming. We will create social impact games with corporations and organizations to gamify work and solve real-world problems.
Web3 Advertising Business: We will release a new “answer to earn” advertising solution that rewards users for answering questions and interacting with advertisements.
E-Crypto News:
What role will the GameFi industry occupy in tomorrow’s economy?
There are already over 3 billion gamers in the world, and we believe that GameFi will attract many people who are currently non-gamers to start playing P&E video games. This massive growth in the gaming industry could be the catalyst that brings blockchain and crypto into the mainstream. Not many people are talking about the potential of gamification of work and real world applications of gaming. I still think the industry has a bias about what gaming should look like and is lacking in innovative ideas. Games and Fintech, in the form of gamification and token incentives, will play an enormous role in solving some of the most complex issues we face in the world. Gamification and incentives to crowdsource work can be applied to any industry and it is only a matter of time until that becomes the norm.
E-Crypto News:
Does DEA have any summer plans?
Yes we have some exciting announcements in the lineup. Some I can not share yet. But one of the biggest plans for PlayMining at the end of the summer will be the release of SOUL Fusers, a monster battle game that was co-created with our game producers and PlayMining community members.
E-Crypto News:
Please can you tell us about your South East Asian nonprofit activities?
We have another GameFi-for-Good project in development to create a game that rewards players with DEAPcoin if they go out in their communities to inspect and help maintain aging public infrastructure. This is going to be aimed at regions that are underserved by government maintenance programs.
We are onboarding our entire P&E game catalog to the yggsea.io platform, where it will have increased exposure in Southeast Asia (SEA), a region where many people from disadvantaged communities play our games to earn supplemental income. Some JobTribes players even earn enough to support their families full-time! We also participate in charity work in SEA, such as our first Impact NFT use case in the Philippines and a food drive we co-sponsored in Indonesia last year.
E-Crypto News:
What is the difference between the PlayMining NFT and the PlayMining NFT Premier marketplaces?
The PlayMining NFT marketplace is where our users go to purchase art and utility NFTs for use in PlayMining games. This market is deployed on DEA’s own blockchain.
The PlayMining NFT Premier marketplace hosts cutting-edge NFTs featuring art, video, music, and more. This market is deployed on Binance’s BNB chain. The NFTs it sells can not be used in PlayMining games, but are instead reserved for collectable items.
E-Crypto News:
What role has GameFi played in helping to lift youth from poverty?
Young people who do not have enough work experience to get a high-paying job can play P&E games to earn supplemental income with little effort. They can join scholarship programs to get started in GameFi without having to buy an expensive NFT up front, which can help propel them forward in the game much more quickly than if they tried to start without any NFTs at all.
E-Crypto News:
Please can you tell us about PlayMining’s scholarship programs?
Scholarships are a system in our games that allows NFT owners to lend NFTs to other players. We do not have an official scholarship program that is constantly available, but we do help our investors and guild partners with matching of scholars in our discord channel and social media channels if they need help.
E-Crypto News:
What are your long-term plans for creating opportunities for young people?
We plan to build out our platform to become a social good gamification platform. We plan to continue partnering with multiple corporations so that we can gamify work and provide token incentives for the players. Long-term opportunities for young people will be in diversifying contents available on the PlayMining platform. It would be great to have a variety of games or gamified work that is suitable for a wide range of people.
E-Crypto News:
Do you have any plans to expand your charity work globally? Please can you tell us about that?
Yes, we would like to keep expanding outside of Japan and Southeast Asia. In the short term, there is still a lot of work to do in the APAC region, so we are staying hyper-focused on our existing markets this year. If there are any global investors or corporations reading this right now that are interested in exploring opportunities, I would be happy to discuss.
E-Crypto News:
Are there any global regulatory frameworks for GameFi platforms? How would they help improve the industry?
On a global scale, no, but many countries’ governments are making moves to regulate cryptocurrency platforms. In Japan, for example, DEAPcoin was the first GameFi token to be approved by the country’s Financial Service Agency. Regulation is good because it helps weed out the bad actors in the crypto industry. We believe that as more and more countries start to approve and regulate GameFi platforms, P&E gaming will become more and more popular and accepted by mainstream society. This will also shine a light on the social good opportunities that GameFi can create on a more global scale.
E-Crypto News:
What are your plans for third parties who want to launch their games on the PlayMining platform? What are the various incentives and benefits gained?
We partner with select third-party game studios to launch new NFT games on the PlayMining platform. We allow these companies to incorporate the DEAPcoin P&E mechanism in their games alongside their own token economies, and we give them access to the PlayMining NFT marketplaces so they can monetize their IPs. We also pay healthy royalties on NFT sales and charge very low fees compared to other popular game distribution platforms. Existing third-party game studios have been successful in launching on our platform and are making healthy revenues by being able to leverage PlayMining’s existing 2.7 million user base.
E-Crypto News:
Where do you think the P&E industry is headed? How will P&E change humanity?
GameFi is a game-changer because for the first time the players are not just an asset for game companies to exploit. The players are now co-creators of whole ecosystems and economies, and game companies must work together with these players to grow and nurture the communities that rise up around their games. This emphasis on community will be the future of gaming going forward, and will also be found in many other industries as they incorporate tokenized gamification features.
We also believe that GameFi-for-Good and Gamification of Work will soon catch on and become popular as people realize how easy it can be to create real-world opportunities through P&E games. GameFi players will be able to recognize and seize opportunities to “be a hero” in real life while also playing the hero in their games—such as by playing games with Impact NFTs on PlayMining to automatically donate crypto to charity.
