A taking of the cultural pulse of the crypto community from artists to comedians to meet ups and beyond.

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Before the match started, the organizer laid down the rules: No T-Rex and no lasers.

 His name is Jorden Oliwa, a 42-year-old Canadian animator-turned professional video gamer, who, for two days, took over the gaming stage at Dubai’s Metacon, a conference dedicated to metaverse and blockchain technology. Oliwa’s role was to put together a live “Spider Tanks” tournament.

 The non-fungible token, or NFT, play-to-earn game is a recent creation of Gala Games, a US-based startup founded by Zynga cofounder Eric Schiermeyer. The giant LED screens on stage streamed players reviewing their settings, ensuring they abided by instructions and abstaining from using overpowering weapons capable of ending the match in seconds. 

 Meanwhile, Oliwa addressed the audience: “Those players are incredible.. they just arrived in Dubai a few hours ago, and they are already here with us, playing.”

 They had flown to the conference from all over Southeast Asia and Africa, where blockchain-based games are growing in popularity. Players connected to a server in India and controlled their tanks to aim fatal shots at opponents, and dodge missiles. Each tank is an NFT, and players can change their tanks’ look by buying NFT skins or upgrading their destructive ability with NFT weapons. The game economics offer incentives and methods to trade those NFTs and turn them into real-world dollars.

“Some players would tell me, ‘I bought enough rice for next month,’ or ‘I paid for my kid’s eye operation’”

— Jorden Oliwa

The players, sometimes called pilots, do not necessarily own the tanks. They may operate them for financial rewards.

Oliwa is the Head of Paly to Earn at the Ampverse Guild, a collective based in Thailand that buys gaming assets, headhunts top-tier players to leverage them, and splits the profit.

The guild model took off in 2018 when Vietnamese Studio Sky Mavis introduced the NFT game Axie Infinity, also included in the Metacon competition. Some of the game’s asset prices skyrocketed from one to 35 cents, turning the heads of investors and players alike.

Since its inception in 2019, Ampverse Guild has formed seven professional teams in Thailand, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines. Players progress from scholars to managers to E-sports pros, and with every promotion, their earnings increase from hundreds of dollars per month to hundreds of dollars per week.

“Some players would tell me, ‘I bought enough rice for next month,’ or ‘I paid for my kid’s eye operation,’” Oliwa said. “That’s what hooked me. It is amazing that we can help so many people just from playing games.”

The pay is not enough to lure gamers in Europe or the U.S., but it is enough to make it an attractive side-gig or even a full-time job in a developing nation.

“That's the beauty of crypto and Defi,” Oliwa said, gaming “becomes a distribution of wealth model.”

The wealth divide alone, however, does not explain the noticeable disparity between Metacon’s exhibitors and attendees.

Gaming studios dominated the conference hall. Fight of the Ages plastered Epic characters across massive screens, promising a full-fledged metaverse with unique avatars, scarce lands, and immersive gameplay.

Fight Legends offered a Street Fighters spin-off, where players can own their characters’ NFTs.

Gala Games occupied the hall's center, with posters featuring their extensive blockchain games portfolio. They also featured projects of their offshoot company Gala Music, the official NFT partner of Snoop Dogg’s Death Row Records.

The audience touring the booths were primarily investors, artists, NFT enthusiasts, collectors, web3 lawyers, developers, and very few actual gamers.

“There is a massive stigma against chain gaming,” said Dina Mattar, the co-founder of Dverse, a boutique agency that caters specifically to blockchain games studios.

According to Mattar, traditional players interpret the pay-to-earn models as pay-to-win, where victory depends on buying the most expensive NFTs rather than gamers’ skills.

She argues that gameplay and animation in blockchain games are still inferior to traditional ones. “I speak to around 10 to 20 game developers per week, and I hear great ideas,” she said, “but it's all about the execution.”

Mattar pointed out that many developers put their primary focus on money-making mechanisms.

“Many quickly started launching games that didn't have the best gameplay, which created a negative image for the space,” she said. 

Yet, she remains optimistic. Amid the competition, she believes there are some “triple-A games,” a classification in the gaming industry that is equivalent to blockbusters in the movie business.

Mattar believes that as those games attract a larger community that genuinely appreciates the games’ aesthetics and gameplay and is not in it exclusively for profit, the model will gain a foothold amid traditional players.

And for some, gameplay and money are both means to a more ambitious end.

“Our goal is onboarding 100 million Africans into web3 in the next five years,” said Toyosi Abolarin, cofounder of the Nigerian gaming collective AfriGuild.

“Internet adoption was driven by two things: pornography and gaming,” he said. To achieve the goal, they chose the latter.

Since 2016, Abolarin has worked for several fintech ventures related to remittance and crypto in Nigeria. The country lacks proper financial infrastructure, driving its population to adopt new technologies. When earning crypto became possible through video games, Abolarin saw an opportunity. More than 40 percent of Nigerians live under the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is about 35 percent.

“People are jobless and at home, and you tell them you can play a few hours every day and pay some bills. People will jump at that,” said Abolarin.

Abolarin believes this incentivizes people from African countries to adopt a brand-new technology at the same rate, or even faster, than their peers in developed nations.

AfriGuild has more than 2,000 players. They plan to develop a DAO, reach out to universities and schools, attract more players, and eventually create their own games and blockchain.

“We don’t have the technology or infrastructure,” Abolarin said, “but it is only a matter of time.”

The AfriGuild player are prolific Axie Infinity gamers, but they were not a match for the Ampverse Guild, who took the title home.

On Twitter, AfriGuild congratulated their opponents and wrote: “Watch this space because this is only the beginning!”