NFT consultant envisions a future where poor players are paid to act as NPC slaves
With the recent rise in popularity of games to earn blockchain and NFT games, there is no shortage of people trying to find various ways to earn cryptocurrencies or real money without any effort. In Axie Infinity this came in the form of scholarships where a person would buy multiple accounts and get others to play them for a certain percentage of the profits.
Rest of World reports on another NFT scheme in Minecraft that netted a crypto entrepreneur a boatload of money before Microsoft shut down his business. According to the report, an American player who goes by the name “Big Chief” recruited young people from the Philippines to collect building materials that were then used by professional Minecraft builders to build a lavish virtual NFT casino. The builders were paid around $10,000 in cryptocurrency for their work, while the collectors were presumably paid a much smaller amount.
According to NFT consultant Mikhai Kossar, the increase in NFT has created new opportunities for people to “exploit the wealth gap” between richer countries and developing countries. “You have people who have money but don’t have time to play the game, and on the other hand you have people who don’t have money but have time,” he told Rest of World.
Kossar also envisioned another way in which players from developing countries could be leveraged to deliver a different kind of MMO experience. “With cheap labor in a developing country, you can use people in the Philippines as NPCs (non-playable characters), real NPCs in your game,” he said. These players can “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just go back and forth, fish, tell stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”
On the other hand, the same players can also team up to buy virtual assets and rent them out to earn money.
However, Microsoft and Mojang have already taken a hard line against any form of third-party blockchain or NFT integration in Minecraft in response to their growing popularity in recent months and have updated their terms of service accordingly. However, the company said it is keeping an open mind about the practical uses of blockchain technology and will continue to see how it develops over time.
Meanwhile, Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett responded to the article by calling Kossar an “NFT gaming psycho [who’s] become completely disconnected from the human experience.”
MMORPG commentator and former game developer Scott Jennings, aka Lum the Mad, also offered his two cents on Kossar’s musings, tweets it“Not only would I quit my job at a company that did this, I would do everything humanly possible up to and including deleting all source code repositories I had access to, to ensure that this type of video game slavery is never implemented.”
