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I don't understand the entire premise of these "play to earn" games. Where is the money supposed to be coming from? In the real world, jobs pay money because t

I don't understand the entire premise of these "play to earn" games. Where is the money supposed to be coming from? In the real world, jobs pay money because the work is valued by someone who's happy to pay for it (and presumably would earn more from that output than what they're paying for it). If there was a cheaper/free way to get that output, they'd use that or get taken over by someone else who does. In a game, what's the valuable output/resource being produced? The only potential thing I can see is for it is advertising, but there's a reason these services that paid you to browse/install a toolbar that would constantly display ads died out. It's ripe for fraud and even besides the fraud, that kind of advertising rarely converts and is thus worth nothing or less than the overheads of running such a platform. If advertising was a viable way to fund games, we'd already have that instead of lootboxes & microtransactions - and no blockchain required. So far all the "play to earn" things I've seen are Ponzi schemes - which actually applies to the majority of crypto and all of "web3".

pavlov 5y ago
Yes, they're Ponzis. You're eighteen years old and see a Twitch streamer talking about how he's making $4000 / day by earning $SCAM tokens on this game. It doesn't look like a very interesting game, but you're good at games, why shouldn't you do this too? To start earning by playing, just one small step: you first need to buy a character. They cost about $500 but of course it's a great investment. The only way to buy the character is with the $SCAM tokens, so first you just need to convert your $500, credit cards accepted... And that is the real-world cashflow that pays the Twitch streamer and the company and the VCs. The tokens you earn in the game are only worth something as long as there's a steady stream of hopeful players bringing real money into the system.
- AustinDev 5y ago
  In addition to this the vast majority of the people 'farming' games like axie are in poor countries particularly in south east asia. Just like how WoW offshored gold farming to china. Axie and similar play to earn games basically allow relatively wealthy western players to offshore the grinding to people in poor countries.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    One thing I’ve been wondering is why are humans involved. If code is , shouldn’t there be lots of Axie bots directly interacting with the contacts and the blockchain. Cut out the game from the middle and just earn directly?

pavlov 5y ago

Yes, they're Ponzis. You're eighteen years old and see a Twitch streamer talking about how he's making $4000 / day by earning $SCAM tokens on this game. It doesn't look like a very interesting game, but you're good at games, why shouldn't you do this too? To start earning by playing, just one small step: you first need to buy a character. They cost about $500 but of course it's a great investment. The only way to buy the character is with the $SCAM tokens, so first you just need to convert your $500, credit cards accepted... And that is the real-world cashflow that pays the Twitch streamer and the company and the VCs. The tokens you earn in the game are only worth something as long as there's a steady stream of hopeful players bringing real money into the system.

AustinDev 5y ago
In addition to this the vast majority of the people 'farming' games like axie are in poor countries particularly in south east asia. Just like how WoW offshored gold farming to china. Axie and similar play to earn games basically allow relatively wealthy western players to offshore the grinding to people in poor countries.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  One thing I’ve been wondering is why are humans involved. If code is , shouldn’t there be lots of Axie bots directly interacting with the contacts and the blockchain. Cut out the game from the middle and just earn directly?