The NFT Arcade – Incentivizing Gameplay with NFT Prizes

NFTs are becoming incentives in many decentralized video games. But for the first time, there’s an entire arcade built around the pursuit of NFTs.

What's the CatBread Arcade?

CatBread has launched the very first retro game arcade with NFTs as prizes. The arcade imitates many classic games, such as CAT-MAN (their version of PAC-MAN).

The arcade runs on CatBread tokens, which are needed in order to play the arcade games. The platform rewards the top 3 ranking players with NFTs exclusively connected to every game on the platform. The scoreboards reset every Sunday so that every player gets an opportunity to win.

A new arcade game will be released every two weeks, thus keeping the users entertained and excited for some new games regularly. Some upcoming games include GalaCat, CatTris, and BreadOut (counterparts to Galaga, Tetris, and Punch-Out).

CatBread’s roadmap for this arcade includes an NFT marketplace, NFT social media platform, and a custom NFT viewer – rounding out the experiences of the arcade.

Although we’re early, it will be interesting to see how they integrate their NFTs within the CatBread ecosystem.

I imagine that the NFTs one day might unlock exclusive games or levels within games, creating more of a reason to collect the NFTs other than personal achievement. I could also see certain achievements (other than high scores) being rewarded with NFTs, in the same way, that players are rewarded for kill-streaks in games such as Call of Duty.

The Implications of Play-to-Earn NFTs

Adding an element of NFTs to video games is gaining a huge head of steam. Play-to-Earn games such as Axie Infinity give users a real reason to play their games outside of just pleasure – people are making real money by simply playing Axie.

Naturally, most new games won’t see the early-mover success of Axie, which now boasts over 1 million accounts and approximately 350k daily active users worldwide.

But when you think of the millions of people who play app-based games like Candy Crush every single day, there’s a huge opportunity to transition those players into an ecosystem like CatBread where users actually get to share in the economic success of the game.

Instead of building just one game, CatBread is creating an entire arcade, which ultimately opens many more channels to capture attention. And I think an NFT arcade is a really novel approach. The trick, though, is determining how the NFTs feed into the arcade in such a way that the more you play, the more you unlock.

NFTs are the perfect incentive in the digital world. They’re designed to be displayed digitally. They have the power to unlock other experiences. And NFT collections are something people are beginning to take pride in.

In this sense, NFTs can be a social currency, a transactional currency, and an appreciating currency.

Whether it’s CatBread or some other developer, I do believe that virtual arcades will make a huge splash in bringing new wallets and collectors into the NFT ecosystem. Mostly because NFTs make for a great incentive for achieving things in games.

Interested in learning more about NFTs and the many use cases they can be applied to? Learn all that and more in The NFT Handbook.