Valve or Epic offering the same functionality that Moxy is soon to launch? “They definitely could do that” admits deFouw, “but
I don’t think any of them are gonna take the initiative to go out right now and do it in the current climate. “A lot of the concern is with regulatory compliance.
Moxie has an on ground USA letter of utility. We’re not a security, we’re not a financial token or utility token. So no perceived increase in value, no monetary value, just utility, so you can add this into your game if you’re interested. You can have your own token, put play- and-earn into your games, you can make some Moxy token, you can use it as you would any other in-game currency like Riot Points or Fortnite V-Bucks. We help with all that and we make it easy for publishers without them having to hire $500,000 a year blockchain devs, tokenomics people and lawyers.”
INFINITY AND BEYOND As much as
Moxy.io wants to make it easy for game developers and publishers to sign up to the service, it’s just as important that it be a no brainer for NFT- curious gamers to do so as well. One of the aspects that differentiates
Moxy.io from the competition, insists deFouw, is that the process of joining Moxy and playing games is frictionless: “A lot of these other blockchain games right now, you have to buy Ethereum, make a MetaMask wallet, transfer that to Ronin Wallet, use PancakeSwap, get the game token, put it back in, pay your gas fees, all
that kind of stuff. It’s such a high barrier to entry. “To play Axie Infinity
right now, before you even
start playing, you have to buy a $2,000 NFT, you have to buy some Axie tokens. It’s insane. No one can afford to do this. No one wants to do it. With Moxy you just sign up, you’re allocated a wallet, and then you can start playing.”
Despite Axie Infinity
probably being the biggest play-to-earn game in town, it certainly seems like the Moxy team aren’t fans. “The graphics are bad. The game is bad. It’s not fun” says deFouw emphatically, saying that were it not a way to earn tokens, no one would ever play it. “We want to get in with triple-A games, really fun games, actual games you’d want to play.” Rather than adopt the
standard play-to-earn model common to games like Axie Infinity, the Moxy spin on the contentious concept is called play-and-earn. According to the Moxy sales pitch, with the former you play to make money, not to have fun. With Moxy, the idea is that gamers play for fun and earn along the way, as they might amass playtime on other platforms. Moxy terms them proof-of-play rewards. Players can then put an entry price to a game, or set up game tournaments, with entry tokens going towards a prize pool, allowing players to earn more money. Or lose more, we assume.
HACK AND SLASH All games being equal, we’re not sure there’s a fundamental difference between play-to-earn and play-and-earn, or, if there is, it can only be subjective. Even so, prioritising fun so that it is at least equal to a game’s earning potential rather than being subordinate is in some way laudable. We doubt detractors will be convinced, however. “We’re not trying to be a blockchain project” insists
Nolan deFouw. “We’re not trying to be a crypto project. We’re not trying to be an NFT project. We’re trying to use the technology – distributed ledger technology – to actually accomplish the goal we have, right? Because it’s not really possible to be able to reward people and be able to transfer things and do all this other stuff if you don’t use DLT. We just want to be a gaming project that uses that technology in order to accomplish our goals, because it’s the only technology that can do it.” But is it though? Gamers earn
in-game currency all the time. We’re all familiar with Steam’s trading cards, which are earned through gameplay
40 | MCV/DEVELOP May 2022
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