NFT Consultant Envisions A Future Where Impoverished Players Are Paid To Act As NPC Slaves

With the recent rise in the popularity of play-to-earn blockchain and NFT games, there’s no shortage of people trying to come up with various ways to earn cryptocurrencies or real-world money without putting in the effort. In Axie Infinity, this came in the form of scholarships where a person would buy multiple accounts and have other people play them for a certain percentage of the profits.

Rest of World reports on another NFT scheme in Minecraft that made a crypto entrepreneur a boatload of money before Microsoft shut down his operations. According to the report, a U.S. player who goes by the name of “Big Chief” recruited young people from the Philippines to gather building materials which were then used by professional Minecraft builders to construct a lavish virtual NFT casino. The builders were paid around $10,000 in cryptocurrency for their work while the gatherers were paid a presumably far lesser amount.

According to NFT consultant Mikhai Kossar, the rise in NFT has created new opportunities for people to “exploit the wealth gap” between wealthier countries and developing ones. “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,” he told Rest of World.

Kossar also envisioned another way in which players from developing countries could be exploited to deliver a different kind of MMO experience. “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 said. These players 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.”

On the other hand, those same players could also band together to buy virtual assets and rent them out to make money.

Microsoft and Mojang, however, have already taken a hard stance against any form of third-party blockchain or NFT integration in Minecraft in response to their growing popularity these past few months and have update their terms of use accordingly. The company, however, said that it’s keeping an open mind about the practical uses of blockchain technology and will continue to watch how it evolves 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, a.k.a. Lum the Mad, also offered his two-cents on Kossar’s musings, tweeting that, “I would not only quit my job at a company that did this, I would do everything humanly possible up to and including wiping all source code depots I had access to, to ensure this sort of video game slavery is never implemented.”