Playing games to earn cash, a scam or a goldmine?

As we are glued to the phones more and more each day on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and many more we are inundated with a lot of commercials of apps that pay us to play games.

Now, a lot of games today are either “Buy to play", “Pay to win” or “Free to play". Now even the simplest game out here still need someone’s time and knowledge to be developed and that requires money. Now, game developers have those three ways I have mentioned earlier of getting paid.

On “Buy to play” you are buying a copy of the game to play and the developer gets a lump sum for your purchase. That means that in order to get a lot of money they need to sell the game a lot of times but that usually translates in more expensive games. But you are getting the full fat game with all the options and no limitations of play. Now you might say that the developer has released new content for the game and is asking for more money from me to play. That is called DLC (downloadable content) and is a further development of the game, as an add on that will change the game in some way or the other. Something like a roof bar to your car, you pay for the full car and then, if you want roof bars you have to pay for them separately. For these games, the developers are getting full pay instantly and have to create more DLC or new games altogether to keep getting more of your hard-earned money.

“Pay to win” kind of games are usually free to obtain (read download) but are limited in such ways that you can’t really advance unless you use an in-game currency which you can get very slowly or by paying real money to obtain. That is the way the developers are getting paid in these kinds of games. The payments you are making for this virtual currency are ranging, usually, from $0.99 to $100 or more. But there is a catch, in order to keep advancing you have to keep paying more and more. And the more money you pay the greater the benefits you are getting and the greater the earnings of the developers. For this kind of game, the developers will have a steady but kind of low income and will have to keep working in finding more ways to convince you to keep paying them more and more but that can translate in a lot of money over a longer period of time.

“Free to play” games are free to play/download but the developers still need to be paid. So, if you are not paying in any way how are the developers earning a living? The same way YouTubers are commercials. It is a kind of “Pay to win” but your wallet is safe because you have to spend your time to watch a commercial or two. Now some developers will ask for a low number of commercial interruptions for which they will be paid a small fee (these are the nice ones). This kind of developers wants you to stay and will offer you nice content to come back every single day/hour. As I have said they are earning small amounts of money from your time watching commercials but they are relying on you to come back again and again.

Then there are the aggressive ones that will inundate you with so many commercials that you might actually lose interest fairly quickly and actually leave never to come back again. The way they make money is to attract you with huge promises of “Amazing” gameplay, thousands of items, characters or whatever and when you try to play you will have to watch a lot of commercials to do anything worthwhile. The problem is that you have to actually pay real money to get rid of the commercials or you will not enjoy your game.

And then there are the fourth kind apps that will pay YOU to play their game. Now, they are actually paying you to see them bloody commercials over and over and over again and they are getting paid for it and they will pay you from their earnings. Now for them to make even $1 they need the commercials to be viewed hundreds or thousands of times. That means that for you to get something you have to spend a lot of time sitting there looking at the same commercials to make the app developers enough money that they can (read want) give you a small percentage. The problem here is that you actually make cents per hour in watching commercials. There are quite a few apps out there that promise buckets of cash for just a few hours of your time but in reality, it will take so much of your time that you might have better chances of finding the said money under a bridge. I have a friend that used these kinds of apps for a couple of months, in their free time, and have yet to get even one cent because when they get close to the target the developers move the target a little bit higher.

So if you ask me they are kind of a scam in the idea that their advertising shows how you can make $10 on the spot or in some cases inside a week but when you try on your own that will never happen unless you actually do nothing else but use the app for that said week.

Anyway, there is a way to actually make good money by playing games: that way is to get yourself employed by a big brand of game developers like EA sports or Blizzard to test (by playing) their games before launching. Now I do say playing their game in a loose way because you will have to actually test the game to its limits to see if everything works as intended and you will have to repeat everything a few times and will have to actually write down what you found and how you made any bug happen. So my guess is your not actually playing are you?…