For a brief, rambunctious moment during the pandemic, people in some parts of the world, especially the Philippines, turned to video games for work rather than pleasure.
The “work” was flexible, could be done remotely on a smartphone, and appeared at a time when COVID-19 was destroying people’s lives and incomes.
These weren’t professional esports players, or people who make a living streaming their gaming exploits live on Twitch.
Shealtielle Blaise De Jesus describes herself as an “average player” who has turned to gaming for one reason: money.
“I decided to play [the game] Axie Infinity because as a student I needed extra money,” said the 20-year-old Filipina.
Learning to play was challenging, but during her most successful playing period, Ms. De Jesus said she could earn about 1,500 pesos ($37) a week — quite an extra income for a student.
A gaming gig economy?
So-called “play-to-earn” games contain blockchain technology, which allows players to earn tokens that they can exchange for real currency.
Ben Egliston, a postdoctoral researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, said some investors characterized Axie Infinity as a flexible way to make money from home during the COVID pandemic.
“It’s really framed as how a lot of gig economy-style companies talk about themselves, offering people flexible work arrangements… [and the possibility of] make as much money as you theoretically want,” said Dr Egliston.
But like the gig economy, said Dr Egliston, play-to-earn games were very exploitative in practice, especially when it came to low-income players in the developing world.
To play Axie Infinity, the most famous play-to-earn video game, gamers had to buy NFT (non-fungible token) characters with real currency that cost hundreds of dollars last year.
Players who couldn’t afford to buy their own characters could rent them from investors who owned characters and then take some of the in-game currency they earned.
These players were known as scholars and the investors who rented their assets were known as managers.
“Investors have said, ‘What if we just start buying these assets and renting them out to low-income players,'” said Dr Egliston.
“You essentially have these kinds of rich ‘whales’ who own these crypto assets, who then rent them out to these other players who get a share.”
A spokesperson for Sky Mavis, the developer behind Axie Infinity, said it was not a play-to-earn game.
However, the teaser from the Axie Infinity website states “join the blockchain gameplay to earn a revolution with Axie Infinity!”
The company also refers to “play to earn” elsewhere on the site.
The spokesperson said the ability for players to earn tokenized resources and sell them on an open marketplace allowed some players to “live off the game”.
He said the game allowed players who were “scholars” to generate resources without taking any risks.
The usual split between manager and scholar was 70:30, he said.
“Without any risk to the scholar, where is the exploitation,” he said.
The spokesperson said a new version of the game, Axie:Origins, will be released soon, and that players can join for free “without an intermediary”.
‘Blessed and stressed’
In 2021, in addition to playing to earn herself, Ms. De Jesus explored the experiences of Axie Infinity players in the Philippines as part of a university research project.
“Our participants usually replied that they were really blessed, really lucky to have had this opportunity, because when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many people lost their jobs or were unable to go out,” she said.
“So, they were very grateful for [Axie Infinity] and they didn’t mind the stress, as long as they made money.”
The stress experienced by the 20 players interviewed by Ms. De Jesus is derived from the relationship players [scholars] had with their managers, she said.
Ms De Jesus said players feared they would not be able to meet the minimum daily quota set by their managers if they went on a losing streak.
Lack of sleep and irritability after long hours in front of a screen have also taken its toll on players, Ms De Jesus said.
While the term “play-to-earn” may be new, Dr. Egliston said the ethical concerns about potential labor exploitation within cryptogaming hierarchies were not new.
In the early 2000s, players of games like World of Warcraft were able to earn in-game currency and sell it through a third-party exchange for real currency to players who didn’t want to spend the time collecting it themselves, said Dr. Egliston.
This practice led to “gold farming,” where an emerging digital working class, most of them in China, played games for hours to generate in-game currency that was then sold for real money to wealthier players.
“It was basically a case of outsourcing labor to poor rural areas in China, and in some cases to inmates as well, just to sit in front of their computers and generate these kinds of in-game assets,” said Dr. Egliston.
“There are real lessons to be learned when we look back to the much earlier era of play-to-earn games, even if it wasn’t really called that,” said Dr. Egliston.
Too good to be true?
Ms. De Jesus said she stopped playing Axie Infinity due to the recent cryptocurrency crash.
“I lost my excitement to continue playing because of the SLP [in-game currency] value,” she said.
“I noticed that the players in multiple communities were converting their SLP to cash as quickly as possible… [there was] sell panic.”
According to Bloomberg, Axie Infinity had approximately 2.7 million daily users at its peak in April 2021.
Last week, the game had about 111,000 active players.
But the recent cryptocurrency crash is not the only force behind Axie Infinity’s decline in value and declining player numbers.
In March, hackers stole nearly $921 million in cryptocurrency linked to Axie Infinity.
“There are also fundamental issues with the economics of these games that have not been completely resolved,” said Paul Delfabbro, a professor at the University of Adelaide’s School of Psychology.
As players generated more and more in-game currency, the value of tokens declined because generating more tokens out of thin air was inflationary, said Dr. Delfabbro.
“People are suddenly discovering that the returns they get from the games decrease over time and that’s the experience with some of those other popular games like Axie Infinity that have emerged over the past two years,” he said.
dr. Delfabbro said critics had rightly labeled such games as Ponzi schemes because they can only succeed if more players buy into the game.
The Sky Mavis spokesperson denied that Axie Infinity was a Ponzi scheme and referred the ABC to the long-term economics and sustainability section of the company’s white paper.
The spokesperson also said the company had made “economic balancing efforts” within the game to ensure that more of the in-game currency was “burned” — spent in-game — while playing Axie Infinity instead of being exchanged for real ones. currencies.
This could reduce the inflationary effect of players generating tokens.
dr. Delfabbro said many game developers were trying to solve these problems to create sustainable play-to-earn models, and “tokenized” activities would continue to emerge in many contexts.
“It’s quite a move towards using tokens and credit systems to reward different behaviors, some of which can be positive, some of which are more extrinsically motivated to make money,” he said.
0 Comments