The ads I see in fremium gaming that claim you can “earn real money just by playing!” aren’t these just scams or are they real?

519 views

I play this interior design game on my phone and I constantly get ads for other games that claim you can “win real money just by playing!” or “win real amazon giftcards by playing games!”. I always just assume these are scams, but I’m curious: does anyone have any experiences with these “realmoney” games? Are they real or is it just another way for hackers to steal your info?

In: Technology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is some money to be made, but not as much as you think. And in general these tools work by seeding a reasonable payout at the beginning, so people recruit their friends, and then gradually reducing the payouts once they have a committed user base.

Monetizing advertising to chase the few people who actually spend money in apps and games is a big business.

Disclaimer: I actually won an iPod Shuffle from Blingo back in the long ago, but since then I only do “offer wall” stuff for gems in two games. And even that fails to pay out as often or not.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m sure a fair number of these are scams. But it’s possible for this kind of incentive to be legitimate, considering the following two facts:

– Most players don’t win much
– It’s hard to withdraw your money

If you win $1.37 playing the game for 10 hours, you’re probably not going to bother going through the hassle of figuring out how to actually get paid. You’re also not necessarily going to spend 1000 hours to win a somewhat meaningful amount of money (more than $100).

So they may actually pay out non-trivial amounts to a few very dedicated souls who love the game (or get obsessively fixated on the idea of free money) and put in hundreds or thousands of hours. But there are thousands of much less dedicated customers with tiny balances that they never claim.

Gift cards are a variation on the theme. Unless you have a coder and an artist who work for free, even the cheapest games generally have $thousands in development costs. So buying say ten $100 gift cards isn’t large relative to the game’s total budget, and then you can honestly say people *can* win a $100 gift card by playing. Of course if 10,000 people play the game and there are 10 gift cards to go around, that means 999 players out of 1000 will get $0.

This kind of thing’s not exactly a *scam* in that the “winning real money” part is *technically* true. But if you’re having fantasies of becoming a millionaire or quitting your job to play games full time, keep in mind that you’ll probably be “earning” much less than $1 an hour.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I can’t remember the few I messed around with on a burn account, but it basically amounts to a few cents or less per 30 second ad you watch, or you’re signing up for trials of stuff you’d never use for what amounts to like $.10 or maybe even a buck or two.

There is ALWAYS a minimum amount to withdraw.

And you’ll never make more than a few bucks an hour if that.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Depends on the game. Most of the ones you see on a regular basis are probably legit in terms of “can you make ANY money?”, otherwise they’d get complaints and get pulled from the marketplaces.

Now, how much money, that is usually the grey area. Typically you have to sink a ton of time into those games to make any significant return cause they gotta make more money on ad revenue than their paying you to play the game. So you might end up with a couple bucks a month or maybe a week if your hardcore playing but it’ll never be enough to really make a difference unless you are finding some way to cheese the system 24/7.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yeah they’re *essentially* scams, but not in a hackers stealing your info sense. They’re basically glorified ad platforms. Companies pay these platforms to tell you that they’ll pay you to play their game. As far as the game company is concerned, it’s paying money to acquire players, just instead of an paying it to an ad agency that tries to make the game look like it’s worth playing, it pays it to an ad agency that says it’ll pay you if you play it.

So if our ad platform is Company A and our boring game is company B, and you are Consumer C, then B gives money to A, and A tells C that they’ll give C money if C plays B’s game. As far as B is concerned, it has gained a player, a player who might just like the game enough or be enough of a gambling addict to spend money on it. Meanwhile, C believes that they are being paid to play this game, when in reality company A has a bunch of obscuring factors that prevent C ever taking their earned money – things like “you actually get entered into a lottery system where you can win the money” or “You can only take your money out once you’ve racked up £10 from playing 20 hours of stupid games”. So in essence, C has given money to B and B has given money to A, all based on the lie that A will give money to C (although imagine that C and B are the average consumer and company, not the individual – most Cs won’t spend anything, but the occasional one will and that’s enough). These methods can also be used by companies to get what is essentially a beta test audience for a game that otherwise wouldn’t be good enough to get beta testers.

In short, it’s a platform for advertising specifically to people stupid enough (or desperate enough) to think that 10p for essentially doing 30 minutes of work is a good deal.

Anonymous 0 Comments

bit of both.

this is generally these companies having deals with ad companies ot get your data/clicks in hopes you’ll buy into them.

honestly wouldn’t recommend as this generally is how you end up with a crapload of spam mail and potentially leaked info.