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
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.
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