Origin Of Gaming Hobby
Gaming has been my number 1 top hobby since I was a child. I loved gaming and I believe it all started with the Gameboy Advance I got as a birthday present when I was a kid. I wish I still had a picture of this but it was the purple one that was kind of wide which you can take a look here.
After that I got hooked onto the Gamecube and the next iteration of the Gameboy Advanced SP. For the Gamecub I remember playing a lot of Supersmash Melee and for the Gameboy Advanced SP, I remember spending tons of hours leveling up my pokemon to level 100. I want to say I was a pretty good Super smash melee player. As for Pokemon, if I look back now I probably wasn't too great at it since there was more to being good at pokemon then just leveling them up to lvl 100. There were things like movesets, Ivs and Evs for the Pokemon to be more competitive which I never knew about until I grew up.
Paying To Play
The gaming market is huge. To give you a bigger picture according to Fortune Business Insights, the global gaming market was valued at USD 249.55 Billion in 2022. source
Part of this market was buying console and games. Even after the Gamecube and Gameboy Advanced SP, I ended up having a Laptop, Wii, a Playstation 2 and then a Playstation 3 and all the games that were played on it which thankfully my mom bought for my brother and me. I'm grateful that I had these opportunities when I was a child as there were many kids that weren't able to experience this. Thank you mom.
Anyways back to my point, this was an expensive hobby having to keep up to date with new consoles to play the newest games. From what I know, games and consoles have gotten more expensive as well. I'm not sure how it is now but when I first started games were probably around $20 and towards the end of my console gaming career around 60 dollars for new games. As for consoles they probably started around 100-150 dollars and now they are in the 200-500s and more.
I guess this was paying for entertainment for most people and maybe the few if you were great at the game you could stream or go pro. What if there was a way though to play and actually enjoy and earn from playing games. Well I can tell you that now there is and it's still fairly early and there's yet to be a sustainable model to be obtained but I see the potential.
Turning Gaming Into A Paid Hobby
It was around 2021 that I discovered Web3 gaming which was gaming on the blockchain and being able to own game assets that can be sold for crypto. I started with the game Gods Unchained. It was an interesting concept to me as we could earn from playing the game in a token as well as cards that were NFTS which could be sold. I started out the game purely playing for free and I actually made a fair amount of money from this game and I still have a fair amount of cards in this game.
After that I also got into Axie as a scholar by my friend who told me I could earn some money from playing this game. It was good money for the time as you could make like 100 bucks in a week which was a lot of money and a part of this was due to the bullrun. Following that, he let me become a manager and help him manage scholars.
Anyways now I'm into Splinterlands which is a game that I've had to put money into but I also can earn rewards which you can see in the picture below. There's also potential in the assets (NFTS) increasing in value. I still think it's far from a triple AAA game in terms of quality but in terms of a game economy this is probably one of the most well developed and complex game economies of all of web3 in my opinion.
Picture of my daily rewards from Aug 14
Concluding Thoughts
The web3 gaming space is growing and it may make a dream of being a gamer fulltime job a reality for casual players that won't be as good as professional gamers or the personality to be a streamer. There is endless potential here and I'm here for the journey. I can't wait to see the growth of gaming in web3 where we can actually own in game assets and sell off if we decide to quit the game. I still can't do this full time yet so I consider this as a paying hobby~