Play-to-Earn Gaming: A Worrying Trend

[Extreme Z7]

Long story short: Earning money through playing video games directly through NFTs.

So I've known about these for a little while but I decided to start talking about it now since David Pakman unexpectedly uploaded a sponsor video for one of these so-called "P2E Games". It's a rather uninteresting video so I decided to look for a more informative video which I've posted at the very bottom of this post.

So about 3 weeks ago, a close relative of mine messaged me on Facebook just to talk about NFTs. I thought this was an odd topic of discussion but eventually they mentioned that they were earning by playing P2E games. So eventually I decided to look into it and from what I could gather, you could potentially earn a decent living playing these NFT games granted you live in a poorer third-world country like I do.

So people I know could potentially get sucked into one of these games perhaps thinking they can make good money doing it.

But they end up not providing any value to the world.

And they're certainly not gaining any valuable skills outside of the game.

Not to mention, the price of the NFT items you earn can fluctuate a lot so you may not even be able to earn money consistently.
(And it just turns into stock-trading)

Right now, this market is pretty young but I'm curious to see how much this will grow within the next year or so. Maybe it will grow big enough that we will start to have larger discussions over it. Or maybe this will all blow over and we can just forget about this as if nothing ever happened.

Either way, I'm certainly not getting involved in it. It just seems like the sort of thing that's deliberately trying to attract fools.

Earn 100$/Day playing games! You could make a living just sitting on your ass playing video games!
Don't deeply think about your life choices! You can make money the easy way!

Edited September 26, 2021 by Extreme Z7

[Late Boomer]

Sounds like some Black Mirror shit. 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Extreme Z7 said:

Earn 100$/Day playing games! You could make a living just sitting on your ass playing video games!
Don't deeply think about your life choices! You can make money the easy way!

That's called Twitch and Youtube.

[Extreme Z7]

@Leo Gura Yeah, but I made the point to underline the word "directly" because P2E games have their own internal economy. You don't get your money from ad revenue or audience donations.

From what I understand, you get your money from other players. And it's a lot more profitable for players from the poorer countries to get money from players from richer countries because of the exchange rate.

So maybe in some games, you'll have "poor players" grinding to get a bunch of in-game items for free and then sell them to "rich players".
Or in others there could just be outright competition to get the best items.

I'm not yet completely sure how this whole thing works, to be honest, but something about it just doesn't feel right to me.

At least on Twitch and Youtube, you're giving entertainment to people at the very least. You're still contributing to the larger economy even if it's in a shallow way.

Edited September 26, 2021 by Extreme Z7