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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

It's different inasmuch as it's even stupider.

Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are people who are willing to pay other people money to perform repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods and services.

"Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent) for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen adequately answered.

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The question is answered in TFA:

> These “economic opportunities” are essentially a wealth transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each. Players who buy in treat this as an investment, since it’s a necessary buy-in in order to work in the game.

It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise to me.

I'm very familiar with Gold farming from Eve Online, where selling game currency (ISK) was permitted via exchange of game time cards sold by the game's developer. There was always a secondary market for game time cards sold for real money and that was legal too. The reason it all worked is because playing the game was really fun, but required to grind to get ISK. People with more money than time would prefer to buy themselves new spaceships to get blown up in than grind for them.

It really sounds though like Axie Infinity is not a fun game and no one treats it as one. So it is something new.

> it’s hard to find any reviews on Axie Infinity as a game rather than as an income stream or speculative investment

> It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise to me.

I would agree with this if the primary income stream came directly from the increase in value of Axies as the game attracted more users. From my understanding, the income comes from acquiring and selling in-game currency rather than from the Axies themselves.

Is this a bullshit job? Maybe. Ponzi scheme? I don't think so.

If people are working this bullshit job, it means that this bullshit job is better than their alternatives. I'm not convinced the existence of these kinds of games is a net-negative.

The in-game currency's purpose is to breed new Axies though. If there wasn't increasing demand for Axies, SLP would be worthless.

Is that the only use of the currency or just one possible use?

I have not played Axie Infinity, but to the best of my knowledge that is the only use of Smooth Love Potions.

What ends up happening is the smooth love potion becomes used as transactional currency in Philippines besides being a game currency to purchase Axies. This is not going to be what the government wants and who knows what can happen next, but as you see this automatically gives people a way to transact digitally by using the underlying infrastructure without a fintech company

however price of smooth love potion has been on a downtrend according to the chart https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/smooth-love-potion

the hype is over, and players are mainly selling every tokens they earned whether from the game or through transaction

The problem with play to earn however is that it encourages people to play the game to earn money instead of fun, which causes inflation to the point where it's not worth the time of a casual player to do the grindy parts of the game and instead just lay people who grind all day. This is why play to earn is terrible, gold farmers will increase currency faucets without increasing currency sinks, and it is terrible for any game with a lot of player trading.

At least for the years I played CCP managed to create keep inflation under control and markets functioning pretty well. I think the percent of players who were either buying or selling ISK was fairly low, less than 15% is my guess but there are a lot of different ways to play the game so my experience may not be representative.

Pay-to-earn is such a scam inflicted on the poor though. Imagine you've been trying to get a job for months, your meager savings are dwindling, and a company says that to get the job, you need to pay them $100 to run a "background check". Of course, you don't get the job. but you're still out that money. On the remote chance that you do, it'll take you almost a week at minimum wage to earn back that money, and you're likely to have to wait 2 or 4 weeks until you see it (which you don't have the money for). None of this works from an economic standpoint, it's outright slavery!

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