This is the same NFT-feudalism "game" that DPRK hackers recently liberated $620 million dollars in Ethereum from.
lmao they’re finding out that capitalism doesn’t work if people can opt out. Curious!
It's a perfect system it just needs some kind of apparatus that can prevent people opting out.
Applying five seconds of critical thought to the concept of Play To Earn, you inevitably arrive at the question "Where does the money people are earning come from?" and the answer must be that it comes from eternally recruiting new players into the game, at a high base cost, and then siphoning that money off them in a very inefficient, diffuse fashion while trying to get more players in. Forever.
It's the most obvious pyramid scheme I've ever witnessed, with the only new twist being that it's a video game instead of makeup or knives being sold.
It will work repeatedly, over and over and over again.
Every new pyramid scheme videogame will blow the fuck up instantly as the NEW THING because at least 100k people will want to get rich off of it, those people will go about mass advertising the game and talking it up.
Same story will happen again very soon. I guarantee it.
Time for a communist grift to fund some shit. Too bad it seems like the people repeatedly running the scams all seem to know each other and game each other’s shit
It's really ultimately determined by the numbers you can push. I would focus on making something that has the kind of novelty Twitch would like, you wanna hit a niche like Gangbeasts, Getting Over It, Mount Your Friends and Genital Jousting.
Hit the right notes and you can use shock value/weirdness in combination with bros that wanna get rich as the springboard for massive initial takeup via twitch audiences.
Or take the idea offline and consider how you can implement a realworld AR game with features similar to Pokemon GO as an app.
Some real grift value in there for people with the right skillset. Every mechanic and idea you need already exists you're just turning it into a pyramid scheme.
Problem is you're not just doing this to the finance bros, you're doing it to everyone else that gets dragged into the fever too.
I don’t think this is the case. Take free to play games for example. These games certainly benefit from an expanding user base, but the majority of their income comes from a minority of players, the so-named whales, who spend inordinate amounts of money on the game.
Play to Earn games just take this model and instead of keeping all the profits, they redirect some to the players who don’t spend as much money in the game. This has the benefit of increasing the player base, thus enticing more whales and sustaining the economy.
The problem that I’ve seen is that many play to earn games are also pay to win. This means that the whales are pulling a larger portion of profits back out of the game than is sustainable, thus devaluing currency for players who don’t spend as much money and destroying the player base. Ultimately collapsing the game economy.
If play to earn games stick to cosmetic transactions so that whale’s don’t have an unfair advantage in gameplay there’s no reason they can’t continue to function indefinitely.
There’s a lesson about global economics somewhere in their but I’m too lazy to find it.
Play to earn games can't sustain on whales buying into the game, because whales only buy to have some kind of advantage over others (cosmetic or gameplay affecting). In a free to play game, who cares, but in a play to earn game you've utterly changed the incentive set from "have fun" to "make money". Axir Infinity's economy crashed hard not too long ago because the net profit from playing fell below the Philippines minimum wage and people just stopped playing.
Also, you illustrated the pyramid scheme for me.
This has the benefit of increasing the player base, thus enticing more whales and sustaining the economy.
This is something Fortnite does. If you don't buy or get a skin, you get a randomized character model and gender, always wearing the same basic outfit. You're denied self-expression unless you buy into it. It's a super minor thing but it's an undeniable psychological trick games do: if you don't have a skin, you are less than the other players.
Okay but that doesn’t give the a disadvantage in the game. Which is where they earn currency in a play to earn game. Every player is on even footing. The only way to make more money is to play more. Not to buy power ups or items that give you an advantage over other players.
I can't think of a single example of a stable pay to earn game.
The free to play games using the whale model are not pay to earn games as the things earned by non-whales do not have a real monetary value and are just items internal to the games that the company can create infinite supply of arbitrarily. Crucially you cannot extract money from these games. Growth allows them to make more money but they have no outputs requiring new income to cover allowing them to be stable even in negative growth.
That just means there’s market share available fir the taking. Proof of concept already shows its profitable and desirable to players.
That's really the opposite of the takeaway I get from this. I mean it is a rare win so it's hard to recognize it's happened but does seem that this one specific vector of financializing games has been rejected by anyone that could be considered a player.
Axie proved that it’s possible with NFTs and crypto. They’re just shitty at maintaining the game economy. EVE has been going strong for well over a decade with their economy.
Turns out that when you build a game around the concept and promise of making a profit, that turns it into a job so you're either being exploited and having no fun because its soul crushing, or you're the exploiter and you dont care about a single facet of the game experience as long as you make your profit.
Its being marketed like "what if when you got a tactical nuke in CoD that gave you 5 dollars?" but instead it turns into like, you get hired by the guy who monopolised the nuke supply and you have to work in the nuke dropping facility while giving 4.99 of those dollars to the CEO of nukes for the opportunity to get the nuke killstreak in the first place.
Interesting that the owner gamers only have power as far as the working gamers allows and enables them. Hmm, I wonder if you can apply this to real life :thinkin-lenin:
:marx-angry: JUST... PLAY... a TABLETOP GAME! Pathfinder or something! Make friends in meatspace!
imagine playing pokemon but worse but also its nfts when you can just download a pokemon romhack and play for free and its actually an engaging and challenging game unlike vanilla nintendo pokemon
i recently discovered that this 'game' has its own song (cw: extreme cognitohazard)
yes wagmi does stand for 'we are gonna make it' (to the moon)
Axie Infinity is the crypto-backed Pokémon clone in which cute little creatures that double as NFTs battle for fun and profit. It’s also a pyramid scheme that relies on cheap labor from countries like the Philippines to fuel its growth.
:agony-yea:
edit: Oh boy, the comments have an Axie Infinity Guy:
Wow. Talk about a “hit-piece.” I guess no one wins a Pulitzer for writing an article about how amazing it was that Sky Mavis disrupted & revolutionized online gaming by adding financial remuneration to an already super fun game to play... That not “scandalous” enough, truth be damned..
Of course Axie-Infinity has experienced some challenges along the way - as did Tesla and Apple & even Microsoft when they first emerged as pioneers of an entire industry... But Sky Mavis has been open and honest about almost everything from the beginning, and they are the true “Blue-Chip” leaders of P2E NFT-gaming in the Metaverse and I, for one - along with millions of others - will be sticking with them until 2030 at least...
The notion that anyone who volunteered, willingly, to play a fun game - Axie Infinity - can somehow be described as an exploited “victim” is offensive. Don’t forget that many of these people in 2020 in Asia & Latin-America & across the world who picked up Axie-Infinity had been put out of work by Covid - Axie Infinity was a miraculous life-line for them at the time.. not a ‘victimization.’ Would you rather work 9 or 10 hours a day under a hot sun in an accident-prone, dangerous, sweltering mine, or joyfully play a fun video game with cute, puffy, axie-fishy things in an air-conditioned saloon? Me too. Is every e-Sports team on earth (a Multi-Trillion dollar industry) an example of “exploitation” and indentured-servitude? Gimme a break!!!
And, u neglected to mention that now that the Covid emergency is largely over, there are actually MORE people picking-up & playing Axie-Infinity than there ever were before, including in 2020. So Axie-Infinity has been growing, not shrinking...
It actually almost sounds like this author works for a (lesser) competitor? Sheesh...
I guess no one wins a Pulitzer for writing an article about how amazing it was that Sky Mavis disrupted & revolutionized online gaming by adding financial remuneration to an already super fun game to play…
So basically Dota 2 but infinitely shittier.
That post made the article infinitely more funny. I'm trying to wrap my head around e-sports being a multi trillion dollar industry or just how exceedingly gracious they were as to give the masses jobs in their shitty get rich quick scheme.
Pseudo-altruism is the most obnoxious self-affirmation technique. Usually when someone uses it, they're so otherwise irredeemable that shooting it down would only make them escalate to the violence they're cloaking in it. They need that angel on their shoulder telling them that they're doing the right thing when they aren't.
This is going to be Elon Musk's "silver or lead" bargain if he ever gets his Mars Colony for Troubled Boys.
:galaxy-brain: Vietnamese (Axie Infinity) company intentionally expose security risk so as to give money to North Korea, this is communist solidarity in action folks /j
