It's me, It's me, that J-U- double G and we are about to begin a journey into the depths of "play to earn" to see what opportunities await in the evergrowing world of blockchain gaming. The journey begins with a little perspective on playing games to make money through my experiences in the early days before blockchain gaming was so popular and afterwards. So, buckle up buttercup and let's ride, Whoop Whoop!
Remember when "play to earn" meant combing through miles of bullcrap to find something that truly payed you to play games or building and selling accounts? If you were around during this era in gaming, Then it is likely you are absolutely in love with the current 'play to earn" type games and the amounts that can be made. I'll go even one farther and say you have been smiling while you play and think how much easier it is now to make insane gains with non-proffesional gaming. In the past play to earn would consist of catching a random advertisement that claimed to pay for playing games online. Most of these app/sites either didn't allow you to reach payout levels or just straight up ignored you when claim time came. So, a person had to be very resourceful to find a way to truly play and earn real money playing games online. Arguably there were three ways to make real money in the pre-"play to earn" world. In no particular order the 3 ways were using a 3rd party site that offered a rate to play games, "play" a game and sell the account later (Usually involving programming/using a script to play the game for you) or the final one was to sell the script you had made for the game to others.
When Mist came along and it was, in my opinion, the best of the early play to earn projects, I played some of their games and was making like 3 cashouts per month($10-20/cashout). I know that doesn't sound like much today, but if you remember this era it was about as much as you could hope for unless you were good at script writing and constantly learning the newest ways that companies used to catch scripts(some companies loved the people who used scripts because they caused normal players to play at astounding rate that made it more likely for someone to pay to close the gap. Mist had good game selection and, most importantly, paid exactly as they advertised. When I began to use the method described in next paragraph with Mist site That was the holy grail of play to earn before the most current incarnation of "play to earn"
Another way to play and earn was to build up an accouunt on a game like Lords online and mobile, Evony and I believe it was a thing in a few more that I didnt play for various reasons. You would learn the shortcuts to getting an account to a truly playable level and sell it to people who believed the time saved was worth the money. Certain games like Lords series, which I played from the early days when you could truly zero an account(Ya, like drop buildings with siege to zero until a person's might was 0), were a lucrative ways to earn from playing games online. Combining Mist with building/selling accounts was also a win in this time of people laughing when you said you bought the whatever package. Until I began to study crypto and started trading every day, this was my preffered method when mixed with Mist app and a script.
Scripts are the last one and took alot of ability and was not really for playing the game as much as after playing the game learn what was asked of you by the game and making a script that would do that particular action automatically as often as was allowed. "Auto clickers" and other scripts were very good to combine with Mist and account building to make money. It was very easy to get banned from a game and lose all your crap for that account by scripting and/or selling accounts.
It is very easy to see how much actual work was involved in earning from games in the past. Now with games like Splinterlands and many other blockchain games playing to earn is extremely lucrative(if you get into to projects in the earliest phases). The days of "play to earn" being more play than earn seem to be in the past as long as you do a little mild research. In the next article we will begin to look into some of the best play to earn games starting with Splinterlands and work through a few other games like Crypto Blades, Gods Unchained, Alien Worlds, farming tales and a few more that I have played that either do or did earn well. Until next time--live, learn and play to earn