Most people play games to have fun, and a lot of that fun has to do with escaping the horrible realities of capitalism. Games can offer players a sense of abundance and richness that seem impossible in real life, which makes play-to-earn titles like Axie Infinity seem downright awful.
What's even worse is that some advocates for NFT games still see something like Axie Infinity as a model example of the opportunities play-to-earn games offer. That is, opportunities for the rich. The rest of us would have to stand around as NPCs.
In a truly depressing feature from Rest of World (via Kotaku) which discusses the collapse of Minecraft NFT games, a consultant argued that the next logical step to play-to-earn titles is to have users from poor developing countries become the NPCs of future games.
"You have people that have money, but don’t have the time to play the game, and on the other hand, you have people that don’t have money but have time," said Mikhai Kossar, a chartered accountant and member of the Wolves DAO group which consults on NFT game projects.
"With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (‘non-playable characters’), real-life NPCs in your game," he added. They could "just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible."
In Axie Infinity, Filipino players used to earn good money playing the game using Axies owned by wealthy individuals. That all ended after the crypto crash, a high profile hack, and Axie Infinity’s ever-expanding herd of monsters made the game unprofitable, but at least even when you didn’t own an NFT you were still technically "playing" a game. It seems hard to believe that someone is advocating for those same players to just walk back and forth in a game where an AI could do the exact same job for free.