The company behind The Sandbox, Decentraland and Axie Infinity is now helping the Bored Apes Yacht Club launch its own P2E game

• The Bored Ape Yacht Club is planning to launch its own play-to-earn (P2E) game next year in collaboration with Animoca.
• Animoca is best known for its metaverse, The Sandbox, and also has investments in Decentraland, Axie Infinity and other blockchain projects.
• It is expected that the Bored Ape Yacht Club P2E game will be its first step towards creating a metaverse for the collection.

Owners of a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible token (NFT) can expect a new perk by mid-2022 – a blockchain-based game where they can earn tokens for their effort. The upcoming metaverse game was announced on Monday December 13 by Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands — the company with money in The Sandbox, Decentraland and Axie Infinity.

The game is expected to go live during the second quarter, next year. This means it’s likely to hit shelves anytime between April and July in 2022.

There is very little else that has been revealed. Other than being based on the blockchain, the only details that have come to light are that it will operate on a P2E system, and users will need a BAYC NFT — one of the avatars from the generated collection — in order to participate. Animoca’s portfolio indicates that this will be a metaverse game.

What is play-to-earn (P2E)?

Play-to-earn (P2E) means that players who spend hours in a game for achievements and in-game properties, don’t have to just walk away from what they built. They can sell them as NFTs to other players within the game, to earn cryptocurrency. Players can use this currency to buy other NFTs they desire, or cash them in to get real-world currency.

Animoca’s collection of metaverses

Animoca is best known for their metaverse platform, The Sandbox where players earn using NFTs and whose Web 3.0 concepts have been seen as an engine of growth. They are invested in the blockchain gaming platforms Axie Infinity and Decentraland as well, apart from interests in the Polygon blockchain infrastructure project and the OpenSea NFT marketplace.

Earlier this month, Animoca’s co-founder Yat Siu wrote that their income for the first nine months of 2021 was $529.6 million, apart from liquid cryptocurrency assets of over $600 million.

Animoca Brands was established in 2014, and claims an investment portfolio spanning blockchain gaming, metaverse, decentralised finance (DeFi), crypto wallets, blockchain infrastructure, NFT marketplaces, e-sports, crypto art, and more.

Why is BAYC entering the metaverse?

Yuga Labs, the developer behind the BAYC NFTs and related NFT projects Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club shot to fame in 2021 for the high valuations their NFT collections received.

In a clear break from art-based NFTs, the BAYC NFTs for instance, provided owners not only the ape avatar for use in the metaverse, but also a ‘Yacht Club membership’, allowing access to an online club, with members-only benefits such as a collaborative graffiti board, exclusive private concerts and other ‘perks’ over time.

The game announced by Animoca is just one more of the perks enjoyed by owners of a BAYC NFT, who the project prefers to call members of an exclusive club. The BAYC project consists of 10,000 NFT items, but they are owned by even fewer people, just over 5900 people.

Exclusive is just the word as well – as seen on OpenSea collection rankings, BAYC NFTs have the highest minimum price (floor price) of 54 Ether tokens or about $216,000. The three major NFT projects of Yuga Labs are currently shown to be worth 426,000 ETH tokens on OpenSea, or $1.7 billion at current prices.

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