Decentral Games Completes ‘ICE Merge’

[PRESS RELEASE – Tortola, British Virgin Islands, 29th September 2022]

Decentral Games, the play & own Metaverse studio behind ICE Poker, Decentraland’s most popular gaming venue, have implemented a plan that would see ICE token emissions drop by 55%.

The drop is achieved by changing the type of rewards obtained by delegated players who are renting the wearable NFTs required for joining the game. From now on, instead of direct ICE rewards, they will obtain “banked ICE” which can be used to purchase wearables and shine for ICE Poker Sit-n-Go, which allows them to join its tournaments.

The change doesn’t affect players who own their wearables, while Banked ICE offers a direct path to ownership of NFTs. This comes as part of a shift from a Play-to-Earn model to Play & Own, giving players a path to owning assets themselves.

This will inevitably shift the makeup of the player base, but the goal is to make it more player-owner based, bringing committed, long-term players who can hone their craft in ICE Poker.

Although delegated players represent 90% of the active player base, they generally extract value from the ecosystem by immediately selling the earned ICE. The change to Banked ICE would help align long-term incentives for players, turning delegation into a path to ownership, and not simply a way to earn short-term money. Banked ICE holders will still be able to redeem the tokens to ICE, but they will suffer a 70% penalty and require a minimum balance of 6,666 Banked ICE.

This will have a positive impact on ICE dynamics, leaving only effective token sinks to generate value for holders. Thanks to the wearables and shine system, the ICE Poker ecosystem can sustain a balanced player economy, where burns are consistently higher than new emissions.

“The existing play-to-earn model is broken. While offering limitless rewards to those that have invested nothing can be incredible for bootstrapping player liquidity, they are unsustainable. We’ve seen this with nearly every major GameFi project that kept this model. We’re taking a different approach. Our focus is on the long term and it centers on enabling our players to own in-game assets through their gameplay while managing the token emissions we create so that the player base can scale without issue. This is what’s going to set us apart over the next 12-18 months,” said Matthew Howells-Barby, CMO at Decentral Games.

About Decentral Games

Decentral Games is a leading metaverse gaming company. They build games and social experiences in the metaverse that reach hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. Its flagship product, ICE Poker, accounts for more than 60% of all daily active users in Decentraland.