The opportunity to earn money in games is on the rise and closely linked to the technology “NFT”. Wealthy investors from the West have previously paid players from countries like the Philippines to perform menial tasks in “PlaytoEarn” games. Expert Mikhai Kosser suggests that we could take it a step further.
Who is speaking? It is Mikhai Kossar. He is part of a group that advises companies on NFT gaming projects. He is giving an interview to “Rest of World” (via restofworld).
Here is his suggestion:
You have people who have money but no time to play a game, and on the other side, you have people who have no money but have time. […]
Because labor in developing countries is cheap, one could use people from the Philippines as NPCs, as real-life NPCs, in games. They could simply populate the world, perhaps perform some job, or just walk back and forth, fish, tell stories, be vendors in a shop – anything is possible.
Mikhai Kossar
NPCs are “non-player characters”; they populate a world and give it color. Perhaps these MMORPGs would still be alive if they had better NPCs:
Gamers have already used cheap labor for menial tasks in games
Is there something like this already? In April 2022, we reported on MeinMMO about the German YouTuber “Sw1pe”: He employed 16 players from the Philippines in the Play2Earn game Axie Infinity, but not as NPCs, rather as “farm bots”:
- They played the game for him, earned in-game currency, and he then shared his profit with them. Sw1pe saw himself as an investor who wanted to earn passive income this way.
- In return, the German provided his “scholars” with the expensive game figures they needed to even play Axie Infinity.
- This worked well until the real-money value of the in-game currency in Axie Infinity collapsed. Then playing was no longer worthwhile for the farmers from the Philippines.
In the article by Rest of World, a similar story is told, but in a Minecraft-based NFT game called Critterz. There, an investor named “Big Chief” used a cheap team of children from the Philippines to gather materials for a casino that he then had built by well-paid “professional Minecraft builders”.
Big Chief saw himself as a benefactor because he was doing so much for the children of the Philippines by providing them with a safe livelihood:
I have a lot of kids playing for me, and they play because they want to make extra money in a country that simply keeps them down.
Big Chief
According to Big Chief, members of his guild had to work hard for 8 hours a day. However, he completely rejected the idea that he was an exploiter.
But even in Critterz, the in-game currency collapsed. Now Big Chief is reportedly upset that he can no longer do as much for “his kids”:
I treated a lot of these kids like my own children, so it’s kind of sad that I can’t offer them as much anymore. Before, I helped a lot of kids by giving them the opportunity to earn some money on the side for their families, and now it’s kind of lame that I can’t do that anymore.
Big Chief
Maybe he will hire a few someday just to populate a virtual world. Instead of chopping stones and hauling them to a building site, they could fish, do some job, or walk back and forth.
More about the case of the German YouTuber:
German employs 16 “China farmers” to work on an NFT game – But market collapses
The cover image is a symbolic image. It shows people harvesting salt in Vietnam.
