Who doesn’t want to get paid for playing video games? This series follows applications, some of which are borderline games at best, that claim to reward users with cold hard cash (or gift cards). In my pursuit of extra cash to blow on games, or Steam gift cards to add to my collection, I have tried a number of these applications. I hope my experiences can help others steer clear of the more dubious of these applications.
R-Planet is a web-based application launched at the end of 2020 by developers Wecan and CryptoLions. Calling it a game is a bit of a stretch, as most of the actual game mechanics have yet to be released. It is a bit more of a staking program, where you can give them digital assets to hold and they pay you in their cryptocurrency Aether. To be fair, it does have one mechanic that might make it fall into the game category, even in its current early state.
R-Planet is running on the WAX blockchain, and lets you stake NFTs, which are essentially items on that network, by sending them to R-Planet. Your account for the site is your WAX wallet address, typically a free web-based cloud wallet. At the time of this writing they allow you to stake NFTs from 22 other projects, ranging from games like Dark Country and Alien Worlds, to simple collectibles like Garbage Pail Kids, or Kenn Bosak art pieces.
The site is fairly straightforward, in that it lists the various projects and you can select More Info to see a list of any NFTs you own from that collection. You can click Stake on any of your assets to send them to R-Planet. This has been an item of concern for some people, as you are essentially handing over your assets. The developers seem to be doing quite well off of selling their own NFTs, and at this point it seems unlikely that they'll run off with everyone's digital stuff.
You can take your items back off of R-Planet by going to the list of Staked assets and simply clicking Unstake. The number displayed over the various items is how much Aether you get per hour for having them staked onto R-Planet. There is no way inside the site to see how much Aether you would get for assets that you do not own, but a community member made an incredibly useful website that lets you check by putting in the items WAX identity number.
The current use for Aether is that you can buy four basic elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. These elements each cost 10,000 Aether, and you can then combine 4 of them to try to make a new item. These new items can then be further combined to try to make other items. If you discover a new combination, you get a WAX prize and an NFT that can be staked back into R-Planet for more Aether.
However, if your combination is not valid the elements you were trying to use are destroyed. This can be quite expensive, as some items take literally millions of Aether to create. The same website that I mentioned earlier also has a list of known recipes, and lets you check if someone has already attempted a combination.
The roadmap for the game has them adding some sort of battle mechanic near the end of development. They are also currently in the middle of doing a "land" sale. Land seems to be new NFT that will generate elements directly. At this time, not much has been released about the actual gameplay mechanics planned for the future, other than you will build robots to fight aliens.
So how does one make money through R-Planet? Essentially by selling Aether to other users. There is an online exchange where it can be traded for WAX here. WAX can then be traded on multiple other cryptocurrency exchanges. That being said, how much you actually will make is very dependent on how much you invest.
Now that R-Planet is getting more well known, the prices of items that can be staked on it tend to be relatively high compared to other WAX NFTs. The price of Aether is also variable, as it has seen a recent spike due to the addition of a land pre-sale, and there being a 5 million Aether cost to upgrade your land.
The less direct method is trying to flip NFTs, in the hope that as Aether prices rise, so will the corresponding demand for items to stake. That being said, so far R-Planet has only decreased the amount of Aether for some NFTs. Both Alien Worlds and Koloboks have had their staking values dropped significantly since they were originally added, in the former case to 0 for some NFTs.
There's not enough of a game in R-Planet for me to really rate it on that front. As a way of making money, I would consider buying NFTs just for staking to be a fairly risky investment. But, if you already have WAX NFTs that are able to be staked to R-Planet, then it is a good way to earn something from them for minimal effort. You can find the R-Planet site here to check it out further.
