People are making thousands a month playing games.
So I decided to immerse myself in this bizarre world
to see if I can actually live off the Metaverse.
I'm spending 24 hours in four virtual realms.
Let's see if I can turn a profit. Now hold on.
In order to play these games, you have to first
get set up, which is easier said than done.
Getting set up in Axie Infinity was
a bit of a wild goose chase.
I thought you needed their currency, so I tried to
send some to a wallet and almost lost them.
Then I discovered that you actually need Axie NFT.
So I did what any rational person would do and
spent the equivalent of 15 Chipotle burritos on them.
From here, you'd think that I could just click
play now and we'll play now?
They make it seem so simple, but it's not.
Okay, I found their getting started guide and
I have to read this whole thing.
After about an hour of getting multiple
wallets, NFTs, currencies, and a serious meta
headache, I managed to get started.
It's been a rough start, but I
have multiple games to set up.
Next was Blankos Block Party.
After some research, I found claims saying
that you could make anywhere from $100 to
$3,000 a month on this game.
I had to try it for myself.
I'm going to just try playing Blankos
Block Party without buying any NFTs first.
The process was really simple.
I downloaded the game, registered my
email and username, and voila. I was ready.
No dealing with crypto
exchanges, no downloading wallets.
It's what you think gaming should be - totally easy.
Now we need to set up Gods Unchained.
This one was interesting.
I found claims all over the place.
People making $30, people making $20,000,
and others saying that you should probably only
play this if you think it's fun.
Thankfully, this one is easy to set up.
This one is just like signing up for any regular game.
Go to their site, register,
create, and Bam, you're done.
You're ready to start kicking ***?
Or in my case..
Now let's do a baseline for this test.
A non-crypto game, online poker.
This will help us decide if crypto games
specifically offer something different than normal games.
The setup was pretty straightforward.
I just put in $50 and of course had to dress the part.
Much better
My avatar needs to match
grabbing a table and let's get started.
Who's this guy copying me?
How he should be copying me
is by using today's sponsor FTX.
Here you can buy crypto, NFTs and other
digital assets with the lowest fees in town.
Their fees can literally be
85% cheaper than competitors.
Plus they support this channel, so trying them
out helps me produce even better videos.
If you use the link in the description, you'll
earn free crypto on every trade over $10.
So when it comes to buying NFTs or any kind
of digital assets, FTX is your go to exchange.
Now that everything is finally set up, I need
to actually begin playing and understand the games.
Are they fun? Are they hard?
Do they actually pay money?
For example, on Axie Infinity, you need a minimum of
three axies just to play the game, but it's kind
of just a tactic to reel you in.
You'd think $100 would get you further than a few
minutes, but the three axies I got didn't cut it.
Lesson one.
There's really no point in investing in cheap axies.
It's nearly impossible to make progress
without buying the expensive ones.
I've literally played the same level so many times.
You okay over there?
Yeah, just wishing I had the
15 Chipotle burritos instead of that.
Should I just quit?
I didn't quit.
I still had Blankos block party to play.
So when you start the game, you receive a basic Blanko, which
you can see is all I had during my time playing.
In terms of mini games, I'm not really making any money,
but I'm not going to lie, I'm having a blast.
If I'm not making any money, I might
as well try to get a metaverse girlfriend.
I should probably ask if this is cheating.
Tell me your thoughts on that.
So I have a friend who's been playing a lot
of online games and he talks to this one player
a lot, but it's kind of like a digital girlfriend.
Is that cheating?
Totally agree.
Next up, Gods Unchained.
This is a strategy game where you face off in
matches to win experience and these card decks that can
be made into NFTs and pay you some profit.
I like this game because it requires
both strategy and a twist of luck.
You start with a hand of cards, and ideally you
start with cards that require as little Mana as possible.
You can see on this hand I drew cards that cost
a ton of Mana, and that's why I got pummeled.
With each match you play, you gain experience, which in
turn allows you to win a new pack of cards.
You can also sell unopened packs
of cards on the marketplace.
People will pay for these packs in
hopes that they contain a rare card.
When you sell things on the marketplace, you
earn Gods Unchained tokens, which can then be
exchanged for any cryptocurrency or US dollars.
Now back to regular poker.
It's been years since I've played.
It's a game that has elements of both skill and
luck, and there's four key factors.
The first is psychology, which is
your ability to read a player.
Perhaps they're tight and aggressive, or
maybe they're loose and passive.
The second is statistics, which is based on the
probability of hitting the card that you actually need.
The third is Cojones.
Do you have the courage to
follow through with your bluffs?
And the fourth is just plain luck, you also have to
be able to scare off the fish with decent sized bets
and a fish is anyone who calls you who really shouldn't.
I'm starting off with some $1 games to brush
up on my scales before moving to $3 games.
[Music]
Okay, that's just rude.
[Music]
What, are you kidding me?
Hey, how's it going over there?
This could probably ruin my life.
My case study for this experiment was this guy.
He took to Axie Infinity during the pandemic to earn some
money while he was looking after his grandma.
Apparently he earns $2,000 for just an hour of play.
By that math, he would have to work like 15
to 30 hours a year to make a decent living.
I had to know if it was
possible, and here are my results.
As you know, I basically blew $100 to play a
few levels of Angry Birds to start things off.
That one stung a little bit.
The strategy of buying the cheapest, most accessible
option and just playing Axie Infinity didn't work.
Now, I don't mean to totally tear apart Axie
because you can earn money from the game and
it is real, but it is far from easy.
Like you may have read elsewhere online, you have to put
in a ton of work to understand the economics of the
marketplace and the game, and you have to devote a ton
of time to see any kind of return.
There is kind of a workaround, though, if you don't
want to take the risk with your own money.
The best way to earn in
Axie is through the scholarship program.
That way you can learn about the game
and how much you can realistically earn without
having to invest anything but your own time.
Now, how much did I earn on Blankos Block Party?
So remember, in this game you receive a basic Blanko
free, which is all I had during my time playing.
I wanted to see what would happen if I
spent no money. Again, the minigames were a lot
of fun, but I didn't really earn anything there.
I did find that you can earn
money through the party pass, though.
This is a special challenge that will allow
you to earn NFTs, and it's possible to
get these without putting up any money.
Now, warning here, I wasn't able to get a
party pass myself, but it appears to be relatively
simple if you keep tabs on when they're announced.
I've seen people earning as much as $1100 from
selling these NFTs that they won from those events.
But realistically, in order to cash in like that, you'll need
to play on a regular basis and get good at the
game, not just the 5 hours that I spent exploring.
Now, Gods Unchained, I played for 5 hours
and I was actually able to win
some nice cards from unwrapping the packs.
The problem is, I wasn't able to forge
any because I didn't have enough flux points.
To me, it seems more like a fun game to
play with, earning on the side as a kind of
plus, the earnings just don't seem that consistent.
I hear people can make decent
earnings on the weekend rank matches.
One guy in Reddit said he made $450, and while that
sounds nice, it wasn't clear if he owned $450 worth of
NFTs, altcoins or if he cashed out altogether.
One thing for certain here is that
the price of cards is constantly fluctuating.
Some might say that they made X amount of money,
but you can't consider that true profit until you actually
sell your NFTs and cash out on an exchange.
Now BlackRain79, has a blog where
he claims to have a method to make
$1,000 a month from low stakes poker games.
But he also said that in order to make
that happen, he would have to lock himself in
a room and have zero social life.
So the key to this would be to increase your
skill set and play bigger and bigger games over time.
And it turns out I'm not very skilled at playing poker.
After my five hour grind, I
ended up making $0 in profit.
In fact, I actually lost $1.50.
In total, I won two matches, came second once, and lost the rest.
I would say that with enough patience there is
the possibility of making money through this route.
But you have to be really good at strategy, commit the
time, and have the ability to take on that stress.
And even at your best, there's still the element of
luck, so you'll always lose some percentage of games.
I just have too much of an addictive personality,
so I'm just going to go ahead and delete
my account and not even look at that anymore.
So I think the play-to-earn industry has some promise.
There are quite a lot of impressive looking games
that I would love to try, but it's just
not an easy thing to get into, and you
can see that I basically made no money here.
You'll need to do plenty of research and put
in a lot of hard work to be successful.
It's not something that you can just do on
a whim half hour a day, something like that.
I think that what we're seeing here is just
the very first evolution of play-to-earn.
Right now you have to choose
between boring profitable and fun unprofitable.
I think that eventually there will be games
that are extremely fun and have this in
game economy that actually makes sense.
How this will work in the future is
kind of how our real economy works.
People providing services to other people who
need those services except within a game.
It seems to me that there are two
ways you can make significant money through gaming.
The first is finding a newer play-to-earn
game that's building in popularity that you can just
begin to play and become an expert.
At the first, players of Axie Infinity made a ton of
money and the reason for this is as a game gets
more popular the game's assets dramatically increase in price.
That's how people tend to make
off like bandits through these games.
And the second and probably better strategy is simply
talking about games, it doesn't have to be play
to earn which is great because then you can
just choose a game that you outright love.
Gaming is massive online.
It would be fairly easy to make a few hundred
dollars a month in ad revenue posting hacks, highlights, experiments
or tricks on a game that you love, become an
expert in one game, post a ton of videos on
it and people will eventually watch.
And speaking of that, I would like
to thank you for watching.
I'm Max Maher and I hope you have a profitable day!