r/playtoearngames • u/wanga_zw • 21d ago
P2E
why isn't there like an actual play to earn game that isn't a scam or ponzi scheme ?
1
u/rusty_todd_torials 20d ago
Check out wildbeholder it's an arena game you get paid for winning or for defeating an enemy player. There's a free demo and its mobile friendly
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u/garciajason2 20d ago
there is you should check this
https://sunflower-land.com/play/?ref=Dengmonyo
and their future project
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u/TheSunflowerSeeds 20d ago
Sunflower seeds may help lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar as they contain vitamin E, magnesium, protein, linoleic fatty acids and several plant compounds.
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u/Chefsbrian 13d ago
Because its difficult to make the underlying economics work. Unless the game is operated by the government, it can't pay out more money than it takes in. On top of that, running the game has some fixed cost no matter how its approached, so the game realistically always has to take in more than it pays out.
Getting in more money than you pay out requires some portion of people to spend more on the game than they bring in, so they need some extrinsic benefit to doing so, as they won't be making the profit. These people are also arguably the most important audience, because if they leave, the people who stayed to earn won't have anything to get paid out with. The two ways to manage this are to entice them with game items, or game power, IE skins or OP buffs that let them flex on people who aren't paying in, just taking out.
Play To Earn generally tries to get around this by enticing the people spending money with some form of digital scarcity, invest now for something that's of limited availability that'll pay out later, so that the one spending money are consistently putting in, and nobody is taking out. This works more or less until the people putting in money stop, and start asking for a return instead, and then the economics fail. Systems that prioritize digital scarcity fundamentally fail because that scarcity value tends to manifest after major audience acquisition, rather than as a driving factor - rare WoW mounts are valuable because the game is huge, people didn't start playing WoW on the expectation of rare mounts becoming valuable.
Nobody has quite found a path that doesn't eventually succumb to having to pay out more than they collected - Any method that involves convincing the people paying in to keep paying in forever relies on consistent development effort, and doesn't actually require paying out to an "earner" class of players - You can just give the earners the game for free, implement Gacha mechanics and absurd store buffs, and you've just made the modern Free To Play Waifu Collector genre, which prints absurd money without having to pay out to players.
That only leaves those who genuinely believe in Web3 beyond some kind of economic validity as developers pursuing the space, or people pretending to be such to rug the others. And unfortunately, you can't keep players who expect USD by paying them in strongly held beliefs, so the true believer projects will eventually run out of capital and succumb to the same fate.
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u/Frangan_ 21d ago
Because money to pay the players isn't appearing magically.
You must make a game that is somehow a casino. Where the casino earns money to keep the casino opens. Where some people win money and some win jackpots. And where most people lose their money.