The 7 Best Play-To-Earn Games For 2022

Play-to-earn gaming is a revolution set to shake up the gaming industry for good. Instead of players buying in-game items they can never actually own, play-to-earn puts ownership front and center, allowing gamers to profit directly from the games they play. 

If you’re searching for the best play-to-earn games, we’ve got your back. In this article, we’ve listed seven of the best P2E games that are leading the way in the future of gaming. Let’s dive right in.

1. Metacade (MCADE) – the Place for Discovering the Best P2E Games

Metacade is a community hub for discovering, earning more from, and influencing the world of play-to-earn games. It’s a platform that aims to be the number one destination in Web3 for players, crypto fanatics, developers, and entrepreneurs to find their part in the play-to-earn revolution. 

While it’s not a play-to-earn game itself, Metacade has big plans to direct the future of play-to-earn as GameFi’s central platform. Part of this plan is in turning Metacade into the ultimate repository for finding the best play-to-earn games, and learning how to maximise your income from play-to-earn gaming. To do this, Metacade incentivises its users to share reviews, alpha, and other useful content with the MCADE token. That’s right – you can get paid for simply sharing your thoughts and expertise with the community.

That’s not the only way you can get paid with Metacade, however. You can participate in exclusive tournaments and test games for Metacade’s developer community to earn a little extra on the side. But perhaps the feature with the greatest impact on your income will be the launch of Metacade’s job board in 2024. This will allow gamers to find part-time testing opportunities, internships, and even salaried positions working with some of the best metaverse games. 

One feature that could propel Metacade to industry-leading status is Metagrants, a way for the community to fund the best play-to-earn games they want to see developed. Metagrants will see game developers going up against dozens of other competing ideas for the Metacade community to vote on. 

The winning developers receive life-changing funding to build their vision alongside their games’ most avid fans, adding their game to Metacade’s virtual arcade. One day, Metacade plans for this arcade to be filled with dozens of the best, community-chosen P2E games.

Ultimately, Metacade’s main objective is putting gaming back into the hands of the players. As you’ll see, play-to-earn gaming has enormous potential, already drawing hundreds of thousands of players that keep coming back for more. With Metacade’s plans to generate some of the best play-to-earn games the industry will ever see, it’s coming first on our list. Keep your eye on Metacade; it could easily be a game-changer.

>>> You can participate in the Metacade pre-sale here <<<

2. The Sandbox (SAND)

The Sandbox is one of the best play-to-earn games on the market today. It’s a 3D virtual world broken up into 166,464 parcels of land, represented by the LAND NFT, that can be used to build whatever the owner can imagine, like social hubs, games, or immersive experiences. Every creation is stored on the blockchain as an NFT, giving players true ownership over whatever they build. For example, unique objects made in VoxEdit are immortalised as ASSETs, enabling them to be traded for SAND tokens or used in the Game Maker.

The Game Maker is one of The Sandbox’s most powerful features. It allows anyone, regardless of their coding or development experience, to build interactive games that can be monetised with the SAND token. This has led to incredible games and experiences created inside The Sandbox’s metaverse, like Dracula’s Castle, The Walking Dead: Stay Alive, and WMG Land, an immersive theme park built by Warner Music Group. 

Given the potential of The Sandbox to allow users to monetise their creations while exploring the games and experiences built by others, it’s our second choice as one of the best play-to-earn games.

3. Axie Infinity (SLP/AXS)

Axie Infinity is a prime example of one of the best P2E games. It’s a game built around collecting, breeding, and battling cute monsters named Axies. By winning battles, completing quests, and exploring the World of Lunacia, players can earn Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) – a cryptocurrency that can be sold for fiat.

Axies can also be traded on the Axie Infinity Marketplace for profit, either by investing in Axies to sell on later or by breeding your own Axies to spawn new ones. As Axies have a set of unique attributes, some are rarer than others, with the rarest selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As Axie Infinity runs on both Ethereum and the Ronin sidechain, transacting on the marketplace comes with virtually no fees. Combined with the earnings made by simply playing the game, this led to a massive surge in popularity for Axie Infinity in 2021, with reports of players in lower-income countries playing the game as they earnt more than their real-world jobs! For these reasons, Axie Infinity is ranked third in our list of the best play-to-earn games.

4. Alien Worlds (TLM)

Alien Worlds is the most popular P2E game, according to DappRadar. It’s a sci-fi-based metaverse set in space, featuring a vast universe of planets that players can visit and start mining for the game’s cryptocurrency, Trillium (TLM). There are several worlds, each with 500 plots of land that can be bought and rented out to miners for a commission. The game’s objective is to expand your mining empire while completing quests and battling other players for the chance to win TLM and NFTs to use in-game.

Players can also stake their TLM tokens in a gamified system to earn even more from their time playing Alien World. Known as Missions, players lock up their tokens for a specific period (1 to 12 weeks). The greater the amount of time, the rarer the NFTs earnt from staking. There are even planetary DAOs, which allow the planet’s citizens to have their say in key decisions that affect each world.

These features have attracted a massive user base to Alien Worlds, with over 200,000 players interacting with the game daily! This prompts us to put it as our fourth choice for the best play-to-earn games.

5. Splinterlands (DEC)

Splinterlands is a trading card game that has quickly climbed the ranks to become one of the best P2E games. It features one-to-one battles that see your cards battling it out in a style not dissimilar to Magic: The Gathering in order to rank higher on your level’s leaderboards. At the end of the in-game seasons, you’re paid Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) based on how high you rank. DEC can then be used to buy better cards, increasing your chances of winning and levelling up.

These cards can be bought and sold in-game and on third-party marketplaces, thanks to each card being its own NFT. The price of cards can range from 0.01 up to 1 ETH for some of the best cards, each with different stats that make them more or less valuable. 

An entire rental market has even opened up to help players climb the ranks while offering a passive income for those renting the cards! Splinterlands is the second most popular play-to-earn game, just before Alien Worlds, with nearly 350,000 monthly active users, according to DappRadar. This makes putting Splinterlands at number five in this list of the best play-to-earn games an easy choice.

6. Gods Unchained (GODS)

Gods Unchained is another P2E trading card game that allows players to earn the GODS token by simply playing the game. The gameplay takes place in an arena that sees players taking turns to deal damage to the other player’s 30 cards, summoning monsters and casting spells along the way.

The game has some earning mechanics that easily make it one of the best P2E games. The first is by simply winning games, which rewards players with Flux, an in-game currency. Flux can be used to rank up or upgrade cards, which can be sold on for a profit. Ranking up increases the amount of Flux you can earn after each match, meaning you can quickly gain better cards to win one of Gods Unchained’s weekly tournaments. By winning these tournaments, you earn card packs, giving you more cards to trade. 

Gods Unchained’s motto is “if you can’t sell your items, you don’t own them,” a powerful message to the game’s players that ownership is in their hands. As a whole, Gods Unchained is one of the best play-to-earn games out there, coming sixth on our list.

7. Farmers World (FWW/FWF/FWG)

Farmers World is one of the most popular play-to-earn games, amassing over 100,000 weekly players, according to DappRadar. Farmers World is a passive mining game with the goal of mining three in-game tokens: Wood (FWW), Food (FWF), and Gold (FWG).

To start farming, you need tools, which can be bought and sold as NFTs or crafted using raw materials. Once you have your tools, you can choose which area you want to focus on, like raising animals, chopping wood, or mining for gold. Each tool has its own durability index, requiring Gold to repair. You also need energy to continue mining, giving players the challenge of balancing resources, energy, and mining.

There are also Member cards, which are NFTs that can be applied to your character to mine more resources, increase the number of tools you can carry, and more, effectively allowing you to up your earnings while playing. These cards can fetch hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Despite being one of the more passive games on our list of the best P2E games, it’s still gained a respectable user base that’s earning just by logging in and adjusting their mining! For this reason, it comes seventh on our list as one of the best play-to-earn games.

Metacade (MCADE): Hosting the Best Play-To-Earn Games

With plenty of fantastic games on this list, it’s hard to know where to start if you’re looking to make the most of play-to-earn gaming. But if you’re seeking to maximise your gains from play-to-earn, then Metacade should clearly be your first choice. 

Given that Metacade is literally a meta platform for finding and playing the best play-to-earn games, it’s effectively a direct investment into the future market of play-to-earn gaming. Regardless of any one game’s performance, the platform will always be there as a beacon of play-to-earn. With its token still in presale, Metacade represents a staggering investment opportunity to jump in early on what could be the future centre of blockchain-based gaming. 

You can participate in the Metacade pre-sale here.