Games are difficult to launch and harder to sustain, and especially in today’s competitive games industry. Players have hundreds of thousands of game options and more come to market every day; as such, positive network effects are essential for a game’s success.

The challenges faced by games are fairly straightforward:

Network effects help games to grow rapidly for two primary reasons:

Economic Protocol Networks enhance the ability for games to rapidly “grow the pie,” by directly incentivizing players to contribute to the games themselves. When in-game challenges reward players with tokens that have unique asset value, players are more likely to pursue them, boosting activity and engagement among players; even truer if players have the ability to craft unique experiences or create unique tokens themselves, becoming a source of fresh original content for their games.

EPNs also forge stronger connections among players. Trading, buying and selling unique tokens turns games into full-fledged economies, tying players together by bonds of commerce and collaboration as well as simply shared entertainment. Ultimately, the ability to earn income from games can turn play into a profession — pushing the cliff of diminishing returns out indefinitely for players who are making a living from their game activity.

But EPNs also directly address the three challenges games face. By providing incentives to players out of the gate, EPNs can draw early adopters in rapidly, overcoming the “cold start problem.” By giving players a direct stake in their game, EPNs significantly boost their loyalty and align the interests of players and developers. And by giving veteran players a reason to stay involved in games that they’ve mastered, by granting them enhanced ability to direct the game’s direction and development, and by giving them economic incentives to keep playing.

EPNs blur the line between game life and real life, turning the time, effort and money that players put into games from a cost into an investment and converting game users into economic communities. One collateral consequence of EPNs is that for the first time in history, we have the opportunity to model and experiment with economies in a controlled setting, giving us a unique way to see what combinations of incentives, regulation, skills and resources are optimal for economic growth and sustainability. It’s not hyperbole to say that the lessons obtained from game economies — and the very protocols and platforms used in game EPNs — could be scaled for and implemented in real-world economies. Which means that EPNs won’t just enable “play to earn”; they may also enable play to learn.

Want to see a detailed example of EPNs in action? Read our in-depth article here.