Sandeep Kumar, CEO of Cropbytes, and Sheryl Varghese, co-founder, share their insights into the success of Play to Earn Games.

Regardless of the pessimism about the future of P2E games, there are some projects that have managed to thrive and found ways to maintain an active audience. One example is the farming simulator CropBytes.

“We’re not just a farming simulator, we’re a business farming simulator,” CropBytes co-founder Sheryl Varghese noted during a live AMA session with Cointelegraph. “We provide real jobs for people with real income, which has supported many users during the pandemic, for example. In-game trading allows people to invest and grow their portfolio. People continue to stay with us — gamers, traders, investors. Some have even been with us since the beginning, which is almost 5 years.”

When asked how they built such a loyal audience and continue to develop games for the long term, CEO Sandeep Kumar and co-founder Sheryl Varghese touched on a few key points.

“I believe Cropbytes’ right combination of fungible assets and NFTs strengthens the game economy and player community and helps us weather different market cycles,” Varghese said. “We achieved this balanced combination in 2019. Before that, we were a pure NFT game like everyone else. But the bull run in 2018 made us rethink the project.”

Recently, we also listed our game assets as SFTs on Polygon. For new gamers, SFTs may not make sense and look similar to NFTs, but they do bring liquidity to gaming exchanges. They also make gaming easier, especially if users want to buy multiple assets at once,” Varghese said.

According to Kumar, Cropbytes is easy to play for all gaming experience levels. "Players are free to explore the game during a weekly trial period and learn the mechanics, which are not too complicated. You can be a farmer, do tasks for other users, trade on the game exchange, or be an investor, and choose the behavior that suits you best. This is a business strategy game: you can start from scratch and build your own strategy."

In gaming, fun is given the same priority as developing business skills. “We have a lot of mini-games, like fishing. Other entertainment options include daily competitions between users or taking care of digital pets. We have always focused on keeping the games fun while maintaining a strong economy. This is how we build a beautiful community,” Varghese added.

Talking about the game token CBX, Kumar pointed out that the core of the CropBytes ecosystem is a deflationary token, “We adopted the deflationary protocol of Bitcoin mining model. Like Bitcoin, the supply of CBX will decrease over time, while the mining difficulty will increase.

Both Kumar and Varghese are optimistic about the future of the Metaverse and P2E gaming. While Varghese talks about the Metaverse’s potential to revolutionize various industries, not just gaming or the workforce, Kumar has his own take.

“It’s down slightly now,” he agreed. “One of the issues, in my opinion, is that we’re still in the middle of the learning curve at GameFi, and it’s going to take some time to adjust. However, these games and NFTs have the ability to survive, as the previous market downturn showed us. We’re going to see a lot of new games and more big studios launching successful tools in these areas.”