The last post above was some time ago now, has the situation changed in the two and a half years or so since then?
The culture in this section of this forum seems quite startup / Venture Capital culture flavoured, for example I get the impression that many who posted in this thread and many many other threads hereabouts seem likely to have been thinking of two and a half years as long long time.
The more years you have lived, the smaller a fraction each next year is of how many years you have already gone through, so maybe as the years pass a mere two and a half years will seem a shorter and shorter span to you.
The fact is play to earn gaming has been going on since long before crypto, and probably, though likely at lower volumes of transactions, even before TCP/IP (aka "the internet") came along.
If you compare how it is faring today to how it was doing back in the dialup BBS days, or even to how it was doing back before the invention of BiTCoin, it seems to me it is still growing. Still making progress.
Any time money gets involved in anything, scams seem to follow. That seems pretty much natural and assume-able really.
A lot of what got me started into the idea of earning by playing was the thought that if players had "skin in the game" - something to lose if they misbehaved - maybe "
griefing" would be easier to suppress.
So I thought about the idea of having players make a deposit, and of course also figured that like often or ideally happens with deposits, when the player leaves and, in the case they hadn't misbehaved, gets their deposit back they'd get back more than they put in, simply due to the trust account the deposits had been stored in in the meantime was an interest-bearing account.
Of course when I started to encounter ads for so called High Yield Income Programs (HYIPs) such things seemed at first glance, if actually able to work as advertised, to be potentially a great boon to a "deposit behavior-warranting collateral up front and get back more on exit" concept.
By now it is likely no surprise to you to learn that HYIPs did not turn out to work as advertised.
I can understand how Venture Capital folk and the like aren't drawn to the idea of using interest or earnings on accumulated wealth to provide earnings to players of games; afterall if you have the wealth earning, why part with any of the earnings, especially by giving it to players of some game that probably seems itself like just a bunch of unnecessary "overhead" shoehorned in-between your cash cow (earnings source, interest-bearing deposit or business profit-centre or whatever) and the output of your own earnings to you.
I would think they also take a view that if what they are doing for earnings is itself an investment, potentially "like any other" but hoped to be both high gain and long term reliable, surely other investors would short-circuit the scheme, investing directly into the the same things the game is investing into, rather than investing in the game or the playing of the game.
But in real life there are businesses that are exactly what such a game would be: a middleparty shoehorning in between an investment or portfolio of investments and the end-user beneficiaries... Think along the lines of Hedge Funds and suchlike.
So there is precedent for a business model that positions itself between a portfolio of investments and a population of end-user beneficiaries.
Not only do such models exist, if you look into it you will doubtless discover that profiting from their end-users is not only not how they work but, rather, doing so is frowned-upon in that field!
That is the kind of thinking that led me more and more onward from the conundrums of the internal economies of games to the conundrums of outside the game economies of paying for hosting, bandwidth, support, maintenance and maybe, dare one hope, eventually even development...
State of the (meta)game so far can be glimpsed starting from the site
https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/-MarkM-
