Back in olden days (you can see these articles are dated 2007-2011) World of Warcraft was pretty much the "best" game out there. Especially if we are looking at revenue generated and number of players paying for a $15 month to month subscription just to play, it pretty much blew everything else out of the water. I remember the day it came out the lag issues were so bad in the starting zone servers that it took quite a while to fix... although that's just classic Blizzard stuff.
At the end of the day pretty much every gamer has at least heard about World of Warcraft. It was so popular that people in China were were willing to farm it 16 hours a day for single digit hourly rates... actually some of these articles claim that many gold farmers made less than $1 an hour, and yet the total amount of money being generated per year was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Do the math on that one... yikes!
The point being that WOW created one of the first gaming economies that actually sort of worked like a real world economy. Many more casual players in America with jobs would rather work their job and pay someone from China to do all the tedious grinding for them. Would it have been nice if the grind wasn't so tedious and the game was actually fun instead? Sure... but the Devil is in the details. Let me know what you come up with.
Sometimes you'd see a guy randomly farming an area and something would always be a bit off. Their character would move strangely and get hit more often with bigger delays between abilities. That's because someone in China connecting to a USA server is going to have something like 300-500 ping, which translates to a 0.3-0.5 second delay on every action. Not only that, you might come back to that spot later in the day (or even later in the week) and realize the same guy is still there farming the same spot for over 12 hours. Wild! Somebody call the GM! We got a farmer here!
It got so bad in fact that the term itself "Chinese Gold Farmer" became somewhat of a hateful racist slur within many contexts. After all... these people were ruining our server and our economy by flooding the market with assets that should have never been there. People were pissed. CANT DEVS DO SOMETHING? However, at the same time, let no good crisis go to waste, amirite?
A farmer from China treating the game like it's actually a grueling 12-16 hour a day job created some interesting economic principals in itself. Essentially hardcore players like this (non-farmers as well) would play this damn game 10+ hours a day no matter what day it was. Weekends are meaningless when you're unemployed, amirite? So when casual players logged in on the weekends (and Friday) the entire dynamic changed. The biggest consumers will always be the casual gamers that have families and jobs and what-have-you.
A Chinese gold farmer might farm hundreds of "Eternal Essence" or whatever and dump that on the auction house at the lowest price, undercutting everyone else. This of course pissed everyone off who was selling "Eternal Essense", but it was also an opportunity.
For example if it happened to be a Monday during 9-5 working hours in USA it was very easy to find cheap goods on the AH that were comically underpriced. All one had to do was buy them all out (or perhaps even just bid and hope the auction timed out) and then simply wait for a better day to sell them (like the weekends when everyone is taking the day off and organizing their raid groups). It would be surprisingly easy to sell something like flasks during the weekends when everyone was scheduling their raids vs some random weekday in which half of the guild was working their day-job.
It's safe to say that hardly any of these gold farmers had any idea how much money they were leaving on the table by just mindlessly grinding away like they did. To be fair when you're making $1/h to pay bills I'm sure making investments, swing trading, and timing market cycles isn't exactly something one can afford to do, or perhaps even think about to begin with.
There was also a pretty significant New Zealander presence on most or all of the servers I played on... those guys are the best, but also they have those lag issues where someone like me could get 30-50 ms and they'd be getting like 200-300 ping, making the game much harder to play with those types of lag numbers.
Well in a way a rising tide raises all ships. WEB3 gaming will inevitably create economies that are way crazier than World of Warcraft and exist across a set of permissionless nodes that can't be controlled by the likes of a centralized agent. If people in China were willing to work for $1/h back in 2007... imagine what will happen if there's an opportunity to work for $5/h. What about $10/h or even $15?
I'm not being facetious when I say that there are a lot of people in the world that would literally kill another person for a job that paid fifteen dollars an hour. Double or Triple that number if the job was actually fun and not a mindless grind. I guarantee it. The incentives to secure a job of such a caliber are overwhelming within developing nations.
And it's also worth noting that while Chinese gold farming was not a Sybil attack (one person one account) it was still that same kind of assault on the economics of the game (just less so than bots). A west coast server was meant for west coast players playing the game legitimately, not an invitation for someone from China to boot up a VPN and pretend to be living in California. So I suppose from this VPN angle it is certainly Sybil attack adjacent at least.
Remember smooth love potions and Axie Infinity? Yeah I just checked the charts it's down 99.5% from peak, so that's fun. Actually it's a good thing because the path that game was taking (and all the others) was essentially even worse than WOW farming. The farmers in the case of WEB3 didn't even have the resources to play/farm and they had to take loan-shark deals from other entities just to participate.
I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but there was even a point where some dipshit pitched the idea that we could pay developing nations slave wages in order to roleplay as an NPC within WEB3 ecosystems. OMFG I found it first try. Wow...
Seriously though how far up your own ass do you have to be to think that crypto is the solution to poverty and modern economies... just to have this diarrhea spew out of your mouth. Mind boggling, but we also have to admit that this is exactly what's going to happen if the pay even equates to $1 an hour. An insane notion to be sure.
Like... how would that even work? Real people can log in as NPCs that are currently just normal NPCs? The NPCs would then be tethered to a certain area and you'd be expected to roleplay as your character as a bunch of 12-year olds are talking shit to you? The second you stop being interesting you get fired? Sounds fun. Amazing idea. Love it.
We are still in a position where real WEB3 games simply do not exist. Show me a single 'WEB3' game not controlled by a centralized agent. If the dev team walks away from the project does the game die? The answer is overwhelmingly yes in all cases. Show me a single game where I can create a skin for the game and sell my skin as an NFT. These things simply do not exist.
The entire concept behind play to earn is flawed at the core. Playing a video game has no intrinsic value. You can't offer real value to another human being on this world by playing a game. Playing the game is the thing you're supposed to pay for. Building the game is the thing that has actual value. WEB3 is in dire need of tokenizing development and rewiring the entire thought process revolving how this should work. Unless playing the game helps build the game and create real value for others: it will never be sustainable. Plain and simple.
As we head into the next crypto market cycle, it's quite possible that WEB3 gaming carves out a big corner within the hype narrative. Don't be fooled by it, as it's completely unsustainable and will be filled to the brim with scams just like everything else. Economies are complex organisms, and anything with any type of staying power will have to be something special indeed. I'll know it when I see it, and I don't expect to see it within the next few years, but ya never know.
When it really comes down to it, paying players simply to play a game is a wholly unsustainable model. This problem becomes exponential when we add crypto to the mix because crypto can be speculated on with money from the outside, creating volatility waves that non-crypto games would never even come close to materializing. Spoiler alert: volatility is bad. No one wants to go from earning $15 an hour to 5 cents an hour. People want stability and guarantees of security. It is known.
So while a rising tide raises all ships, the opposite is also true. It's hard to raise the tide when that are a million forces out there pulling it back out to sea. We would do well to remember this within WEB3. Only sustainable business models are going to work, and play-to-earn is anything but sustainable given the current iteration.
