All in a day's work; redefining jobs globally
By Jason Brink, President of Blockchain at Gala Games
“Work” isn’t what it used to be. Regardless of whether we are discussing office workers crowding the streets in the central business districts of the world, or factory workers packing manufacturing centers, the very concept of work is going through a shift that it hasn’t seen since the days of the industrial revolution. Naturally, this leads to cooking digital baguettes, blasting high kinetic energy weapons on mechanized arachnids, and hunting the treasure goblin. Perhaps before we understand what the link might be and why it’s an essential change for you to understand and benefit from, let’s dig into the current state of work.
One of the most obvious catalysts for this work revolution is the fact that the pandemic has highlighted some serious flaws in the way that we used to work. Several months at home wearing pajama bottoms and a button-down shirt has convinced huge swaths of the economy that the whole concept of "going to the office" is not quite as necessary as it once seemed. As the pandemic wanes, some of this impact is beginning to lessen, but a 2020 Gallup poll showed that 74% of millennial Americans did not want to return to their full time jobs.
This shift is going to have some interesting long-term impacts on industries directly, through a gradual decentralization and movement towards more open forms of work and, tangentially, to changes in the valuations of real estate in CBDs around the world. Why spend your shareholder dollars on prestige real estate when your workers are happier, healthier, and more productive working from home? Remote offices allow workers to save more of their income and feel that they have a greater sense of freedom and ownership over their own lives - surely that’s a win-win.
This brings us to the collapse of blue collar wage earning. Something very interesting is happening here, as studies show that people in the developed world are walking away from their jobs and surviving on various levels of side gigs and entrepreneurial activity, mixed with a degree of social support. At the same time, people in the developing world are clamouring for opportunities because their nations do not have the ability to arbitrarily print money without having the rest of the planet treat their currency like a third-rate shitcoin. This brutal economic reality, finally, leads us to the hot topic of digital baguettes and how Gala Games is changing the world.
When I first tried to play Town Star, the first game produced by Gala Games, I thought it was a cute Farmville-esque game that was essentially an idle clicker...I should have no problem with it. However, I was quickly broken on the wheel of my own hubris as I ran out of gas and ended up nuking my town and starting again. It took me some time to figure out how to deploy the town correctly, but today I can now make my way through the byzantine supply chain to get everything needed to make baguettes, my tier-3 good of choice, completing my daily point total requirement and unlocking the earning potential of my NFTs. At the click of a button, I can claim some cryptocurrency which I can now, if I chose, liquidate for ETH or GALA via a decentralized exchange.
This is Play-2-Earn (P2E), and it is changing working lives around the globe. Gala Games is leading the charge in the creation of sustainable P2E ecosystems for dozens of games. We started our whole business on a few key tenets: games should be fun, players should own their own assets, and there should be the potential for earning in every game. Why should game companies, who have sat at the center of the gaming ecosystem for decades, have all the fun and, more to the point, all the money? We challenged ourselves to create a new model, whereby the players would control the overall economy of the game through working, earning items and tokens, and then selling them to other users who wanted to pay their way through. We figured that as the secondary gray-market for in-game items is a 50bn industry, even with the threat of bans and account deletion due to terms of service violation, we could obviously do better.
Which is exactly what we have done. Today, there are tens of thousands of users within the Gala Games ecosystem who are either playing Town Star to earn, or are preparing for the launch of our upcoming products like Spider Tanks or Mirandus. The ambition to work in gaming is becoming a reality for many because of Gala Games. In our games, you can compete in a MOBA(Multiplayer Online Battle Arena)-brawler in player-owned tanks for parts and currency, or hunt through the forests of an upcoming Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game (MMORPG), Mirandus. Each of these games presents interesting earning potential and has made Gala Games the ONLY major player in the blockchain gaming space that has not taken any VC funding. Entirely self-supported, Gala Games stands apart from the rest.
Moreover, Gala Games has built this entire ecosystem remotely. We have over 170 employees in more than a dozen countries, all working asynchronously to make our colossal vision a reality. We are growing by leaps and bounds, and while we experience the growing pains of every other rapidly scaling company, we are producing more and more and are quite profitable. This is being done even while building an ecosystem which enables people around the world to supplement or even replace their wages. In this new vision of work we have seen players in the Philippines purchase their first homes because they played games we have made. We have seen people clear credit card debt. We have seen one purchaser who bought into the VOX drop completely clear their college loans.
Gala Games can do this because we have created a model that is self-sustaining, profitable, and leaves us free from any external control from VCs or investors that would force us to put a single element of our bottom line ahead of the others. We take the concept of the triple bottom line seriously, and have made great strides in advancing People, Planet, AND Profit. We are the masters of our own destiny and have chosen to use this to confront traditional gaming head-on with the blockchain in our back pocket and we invite you all to come with us and make work more like play.