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> and the ability to make real income off of your time investment in a game is huge

I'll bite. What value-added services are gamers providing to justify an income?

Keep in mind I considering entertainment like streaming value-added to gaming.

The other thing to note is that gold farming and selling accounts is already a job so it’s actually nothing new.

Is that what's happening though? Are gamers grinding NFTs for whales, or something like that?

Err, no. People work for companies farming assets, xp and so on in a variety of games and then sell the accounts on the grey market. For normal games. In the NFT space Axie Infinity has a very similar model and similarly targets people in poorer countries with a pay to earn model although their currency was collapsing last I looked. Although it’s intentional rather than something games companies want to avoid it’s not actually mechanically that different.

gold farming is against the TOS and a bannable offense in many games though.

Yup, which doesn’t stop people doing it nor does it stop people doing it as a job.

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