Description
In 2022, global revenue from the video game market reached $185bn, exceeding that of the film and music markets combined (Arora 2023). The white paper released by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 has spurred applications of blockchain technology in an ever growing set of areas, but these have been dogged by fraud and theft. Crypto-games are an emerging element of this market integrating blockchain technology into games, often on the basis of a ‘play to earn’ model, and is largely unexplored in academic literature to date. This paper examines two of the biggest crypto-games: (i) Axie Infinity, which at its peak had 2.7m daily users and was briefly the primary source of income for significant numbers of people in the Philippines; and (ii) Decentraland, the associated cryptocurrency (Mana) of which has a current market cap of over half a billion US dollars. The paper begins the analysis of this emergent phenomenon by evaluating whether these two games are instances fraud, as has characterised much of the crypto universe. Secondly, it evaluates whether they represent new avenues of exploitation, through examining the economy of Axie Infinity and whether those seeking to earn a living from it were simply being exploited by others who would earn greater rewards from their work.
