Key takeaways
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DEA operates mainly in Southeast Asia and has players from more than 100 countries worldwide
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DEA seeks to grow its ecosystem via partnerships with third-party games, NFT art collections and metaverse projects.
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Artists on DEA make money via royalties
Digital Entertainment Asset (DEA), the operator of the PlayMining GameFi platform, is co-developing a groundbreaking new social good use case for GameFi: a game that incentivises real-world social contribution to the maintenance of shared community infrastructure.
As a P2E platform, players get to play fun video games and are rewarded with P2E tokens when they inspect physical infrastructure in communities where understaffed government utility organizations can’t patrol on their own.
We sat down with the DEA team to discuss their project, the impact on the web3 ecosystem, and how they intend to expand to other countries.
Question: DEA operates majorly in Southeast Asia. Are you present in all Southeast Asian countries, and do you have plans to expand to other parts of the continent?
Answer:
The majority of our users are from Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan, but we also have players from more than 100 countries worldwide, including most of SEA. We aim to build games with worldwide international appeal and hope to attract players from all regions and walks of life.
One of our company’s primary goals is to use our games to help people. We’ve started with Southeast Asia because GameFi has grown very popular there as a means of earning supplemental income. We would love to see GameFi also be embraced in other regions with impoverished communities, and grow our community in any place where people can derive real-world value from playing our games.
Q: According to your website, DEA is a PlayMining GameFi platform. Do you combine GameFi and crypto mining, or does PlayMining stand for something else?
Answer:
The “mining” in the platform’s “PlayMining” name only refers to the ability of players to earn $DEP tokens by playing games. It is not “mining” in the strictest sense of the word, but it can feel like it to players, who receive real cryptocurrency rewards by completing quests in games.
While DEA operates its own blockchain and token, it does not engage in the mining of external cryptocurrencies. DEAPcoin launched in 2018, with 30 billion $DEP tokens created at Genesis. We reserved 20 billion $DEP, or roughly 66% of the total number of tokens, for ecosystem incentives and distribution on the PlayMining platform as rewards for playing our games and for DeFi services like staking
Q: Are there specific locations with physical infrastructure that DEA players can inspect? How do you determine the locations that need inspection?
Answer:
We cannot release much information about the TEPCO game, as it is still in its early phase of development. However, we can say that such locations would be determined by our partner, who is collaborating with us on this game, Greenway Grid Global (GGG).
According to their website, GGG is a joint venture established in Singapore in part by TEPCO as a vehicle “to invest and operate overseas power transmission and distribution business and next-generation infrastructure business, and incubate new business, as well as to nurture global leaders…with the Asian market being the main target.”
Q: DEA has over 2.7 million users worldwide. How do you intend to provide more value to your existing users and capture more users?
Answer:
We are constantly expanding the PlayMining platform by developing new P2E games for our community to enjoy, and all of our games bring players into the DEAPcoin ecosystem with P2E rewards and an NFT marketplace. We also actively seek out partnerships with other companies and influencers to build content for PlayMining, such as new third-party games, NFT art collections, metaverse projects, events and promotions and so on.
One of our primary goals with our partnerships is to be wholly transparent and fair—we pay out royalties on the PlayMining NFT marketplace, for example, and it is much cheaper for game studios to launch on PlayMining than on other major distribution platforms such as Nintendo or PlayStation, which take an exorbitant 30% cut of profits. We have built our platform to be amazing not only for our community of 2.7 million users but also for our partners, to ensure PlayMining’s sustainability.
Another way that we can bring more value to our existing users is by buying back DEAPcoin from the market. Over time, we anticipate that this will help stabilize the DEAPcoin token price.
We are also always looking for new ways to make a social impact through GameFi. We believe that there is immense potential for GameFi to create a great amount of real value in the world.
Q: DEA supports third-party indie game studios. How do you incorporate them and their games into your platform?
Answer:
We partner with third-party game studios to develop new games on the PlayMining GameFi platform. We allow these companies to incorporate DEAPcoin into their P2E reward structure, and they can also have their own token economies. We also give them access to sell NFTs related to their games on the PlayMining NFT and PlayMining NFT Premier marketplaces, where they can build out their creative IPs, and they also earn royalties on secondary sales of their NFTs.
PlayMining provides this support for indie game studios because we know first-hand how brutally competitive the video game industry can be. Distributors and other middlemen typically steal most of the profits, leaving small game developers with very little overhead for marketing and building out their IPs with supplementary content such as fan art, animation and other products. And in this industry, if you don’t monetize your IP, it can be difficult to achieve longevity for games. We aim to change all that by leveling the playing field with a fairer system that doesn’t exploit our partners.
Q: How do official brand artists and fan artists earn money on the PlayMining NFT marketplace?
Answer:
DEA pays out royalties to both official artists and creators of fan art who sell NFTs on the PlayMining NFT marketplace. There are also many NFTs on our marketplace that give players the ability to earn even more DEAPcoin in PlayMining games. For example, there is a collection of ‘Farmland NFTs’ that, when used in the PlayMining coin pusher game ‘Lucky Farmer’, increases the odds of the player scoring winning slot machine combinations such as the triple-seven ‘Fever Time’ jackpot that makes $DEP rain onto the playing field.