In a metaverse often criticized for being devoid of things to do, the poker tables in Decentraland’s ICE Poker virtual casino have never been so crowded.
Decentral Games’ play-to-earn poker platform hosts around 6,000 unique players every day, making up more than 30% of Decentraland’s daily users. Over the past three months, the game has generated more than $7.5 million in revenue through its various revenue streams, according to Decentral Games founder Miles Anthony.
“At any given time, we have over 1,000 players playing poker,” Anthony told CoinDesk in an interview. “It doesn’t seem like many users, but when it comes to the open metaverse, it’s pretty substantial considering that the main problem right now with metaverses is that they’re empty.”
No matter how much print “Web 3” is collecting, it’s important to remember that the numbers are still small. The number of wallets (the pseudonymous, but not exactly precise, measure of real humans interacting with Ethereum-based smart contracts) that touch OpenSea on a daily basis is only 50,000, according to DappRadar. The non-fungible token (NFT) market was valued at $13.3 billion in a funding round last month.
Decentral Games bet big on the metaverse a year and a half ago, when it started acquiring virtual land in Decentraland. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) claims to have accumulated more than 1,000 packs of the game to date. This effort was supported in part by an investment by Decentraland itself in September.
The success of Decentral Games’ ICE Poker should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with online gaming platforms, which have been a hit among virtual communities for decades.
Anthony says the platform considers itself the Web 3 iteration of the genre, requiring users to purchase one of its NFT wearables before being able to win real coins. The casino issued two separate tokens – ICE and DG – to support its Las Vegas ecosystem.
Wearables, sold in drops on the limited-bid platform, already have high prices on secondary markets like OpenSea, maintaining a minimum price of 2.46 ETH (about $6,500) at the time of writing.
With an expensive entry point, guilds have become a fundamental aspect of the game’s ecosystem, Anthony said. He says the game intentionally avoided relying on mega guilds like YGG for accessibility. Gaming guilds typically rent key crypto assets for a share of retail users’ future profits.
“To be 100% honest, I actually think big guilds are really bad for gaming economies,” Anthony told CoinDesk. “Obviously, the ratings for [guilds] have been pretty wild. And it can be great for the short term as well, but I think many of these agreements overlook the long-term effects.”
Anthony says the platform solves this problem with a built-in delegation system, where players can lend an NFT wearable to another user in exchange for a 60-40 share of any income earned with it. Users who delegate only a single NFT make up the majority of funders of the platform.
Despite the huge hype around the future of the metaverse in recent months, few poker platforms have been able to successfully enter the space, in part due to regulation.
Virtue Gaming became the first play-to-earn poker platform with a Malta Gaming Authority license in December, although its platform differs from ICE Poker in that it makes money on traditional casino mechanics rather than tokenization.
Anthony said that Decentral Games is also preparing to launch a mobile iteration of ICE Poker in the coming months.