I first stumbled across Atlas Earth a few month ago when bronzedragon talked about it in one of his videos. Back in the day, it wasn't available in Germany and so I quickly forgot about it again. Two and a half weeks ago, though, it finally got released in Germany and so I went straight to the app store and tried it out.
Contrary to most of the stuff I try, Atlas Earth is actually not web 3. It doesn't have any blockchain integration and it's a strictly centralized app. Nevertheless, the concept is somewhat intriguing to me. At first glance, it's one of these classical Paid4 apps, that pays you tiny amounts of money for completing different tasks. In that, it's pretty similar to stuff like Idle Empire for example. You watch adds, take surveys, download and play games of questionable quality, and so on. For each of these tasks, you are then usually awarded with tiny tiny rewards that will eventually translate to a few bucks, but only after you wasted countless hours on the app which could have been spent way more productively elsewhere.
The thing that separates Atlas Earth from these kinds of apps is that instead of paying you a one time reward for the stuff that you do, you will get rewarded continuously. The way it works is pretty simple. Whenever you complete any given task, you are rewarded with Atlas Bucks, the games ingame currency. 100 Atlas Bucks will buy you a plot of land and that plot is then going to produce rent, which is paid in US Dollar and can be withdrawn any time it hits a threshold of at least $5. Each of these plots is a small parcel of land in the real world, so you can slowly start to buy your own neighborhood if you want to.
Plots come in 4 different rarities which are randomly assigned when you buy a plot of land, with higher rarity plots providing you with a higher hourly rent. Once you've acquired these plots, they are yours to keep permanently and you will earn rent from them for as long as the game runs.
Which also brings us to the obvious question - how is this going to work long term? Well, obviously, it's not. Let's be real about it for a minute. The way the system is set up, people will acquire more and more ingame property, generating more and more income until the game will eventually have to pay out more than what they take in. So I have no illusions at all that this thing is going to pay my pension some day. The question then becomes, Is it worth my time? And well, I'm pretty hopeful that they will be able to run this thing for quite some while. This is for several reasons:
First, and probably most importantly, the two earning systems are strictly separated within the game. Buying more plots is going to generate more rent, but that rent is paid out in dollar, so no matter how many plots you buy, you'll always have to acquire Atlas Bucks in order to buy more plots. This in itself is already going to slow down the progress of players and will prevent any exponential growth from happening over time. You can exchange earned Dollars for Atlas Bucks, but the rate they offer is so laughably bad that this is never going to be an issue.
Laughably bad is also the key word when we're talking about the option to buy Atlas Bucks with real world money. The cost is absurd, and I mean like utterly, delusional bad:
So in small rates, 5 bucks are going to buy you exactly one plot, but even if you shell out $1000, this is only going to net you 260 plots of land. The fun thing is, you can sell your plots to other players (if you find somebody that wants to buy it), but there's no way to exchange Atlas Bucks to US Dollar. So any money spent on the game is gone and it would take years to recoup the money you've spent there.
Then there's a second mechanic in the game that massively hampers growth at a meaningful rate, and that is boost. Whenever you feel like, you can watch a short commercial and that is giving you a 20x boost to your rental income. As that number already implies, without boost, you aren't earning very much or they wouldn't be able to provide a boost of that magnitude. Thing is, the more plots you buy, the worse the boost factor is going to get. Here's a really easy to read table for that:
What this is trying to tell you is the following: Up until the 70th plot, you always get a 20x boost for all of the plots. The moment you buy plot 71, though, you only get a 15x boost. And that is for all your plots. So indeed, you will earn considerably less the moment you go above 70 plots. This goes on until you have at least 401 plots at which point you will get a 2x boost which than is going to be constant forever. But just do the math - if you have 70 plots boosted 20x, that's the same as 1400 plots unboosted. If you have 401 plots boosted 2x, that's 802 plots unboosted. Funny, isn't it? So the more plots you get the less you will earn for a long long time. You'd have to get to 700 plots to earn as much as you could have earned from just saying at 70 plots. Fun times.
So no, in terms of expected rewards, this is certainly not worth my time. I'm always intrigued by the option to generate passive income streams and I have to give it to them, they really set this whole thing up pretty nicely. Initially, you will see your rent go up in a straight line. But thanks to the boost system, this is going to plateau rather quickly and after that, you basically just work to keep earning what you already earned, which is... not very enticing.
Nevertheless, it only takes me a few minutes on the side while doing other things to buy a plot a day, so I'll probably still play it for a few more weeks, get my plots up to 70, and then just let it run to see what it can do for it. If you do want to try it out, just keep in mind that it's absolutely insane to spend any real world money on this game. So if you do, make sure to strictly stay Free2Play!