Play It Forward DAO is Making Play-to-Earn Gaming Open To Everyone

The advent of NFT games has transformed the video gaming landscape overnight, adding an economic component to gaming. With games now incorporating scarce virtual items as NFTs, it's possible to offer players rewards that have real-world value.

That's created a new class of player—the play-to-earn gamer, who's able to monetize their time in-game. It's even enabled gamers in some countries to earn a living by playing titles such as Axie Infinity—which became the most-traded NFT collection ever in late 2021. 

Now, the play-to-earn space is becoming professionalized, as guilds and scholarship programs spring up, creating profit-sharing models and helping to onboard new players to play-to-earn platforms (which frequently have a high barrier to entry because of the initial capital outlay required to get started).

By helping new players obtain NFT assets that might be priced out of their reach, guilds "give them the opportunity for them to earn those rewards and make an income for themselves," explained Play It Forward DAO co-founder Alfonso 'Cholo' Maputol in a recent AMA.

That's where Play It Forward DAO comes in. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is aiming to make play-to-earn work for the players, opening the space up to a broader audience of people who stand to benefit from it.

The DAO consists of two key elements.

First, there's a P2E Board that aggregates data from a player's favorite games, creating an immutable record of their achievements and earnings, and verifying guilds to match players with guilds and remove bad actors.

"Our mission is to make play-to-earn easier and safer for everyone," explained Play it Forward co-founder Janze de Guzman. "So P2E Board was created to make the matching of scholars, guilds and managers easier through our marketplace features, while at the same time providing tools to guilds that want to run scholarships, giving them the tools that they need to engage their communities and grow."

Secondly, there's the PIF Guild, which has grown from 30 Axie Infinity scholars to a community of 3,000 play-to-earn gamers across games including Axie Infinity, Thetan Arena, and Pegaxy, since its inception in July 2021. The Guild has partnered with crypto exchanges, enabling scholars to receive payments in fiat currency.

The aim of the DAO, explained Maputol, is to make play-to-earn more accessible. "There's a lot of complexity around getting started as either a guild or a player in play to earn. And we want to make it super simple for anyone to just come in," he said.

To that end, Play It Forward DAO is planning an array of initiatives from educational campaigns to management tools for guilds.

Plug-and-play-to-earn

Eventually, the aim is to have a plug-and-play system for play-to-earn, de Guzman said, envisioning a system where gamers can shop for games, click "play" and get started immediately, without having to understand blockchain. "That's enabled by having these guilds, who in turn are empowered by having investors who are interested in driving growth in this space. So it's a very intertwined ecosystem," said Guzman.

The Play It Forward DAO is underpinned by the PIF token, launching January 19-22 on the Copper Launch platform. PIF is used for staking; the DAO also plans to reward stakers with priority allocation in NFT drops from the DAO and its games partners, and "enhanced returns" on the platform for players who hold the token.

The token is also used for governance, with voting power assigned based on the amount of PIF held by token holders as well as the overall circulating supply.

While the DAO is a natural evolution of the fact that games are now creating real-world value, ultimately it's important to remember that play-to-earn is about gaming, said de Guzman. "Fun is at the core of this. While reward is there as well, we are really focused on giving gamers the special attention that they need. Because this, after all, is about playing, right?"

PIF's token launch auction is currently underway on Copper Launch, concluding on January 22. Find out more on Play It Forward's social media channels:

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