Where do #play2earn earnings ultimately come from?

Across gaming in general there seems to be a common concept that the more players you can get the better.

But in #play-to-earn ( #play2earn ) shouldn't more players mean dividing the game's total earnings among more earners? Thus seemingly indicating that if you hope to be an earner you likely should be hoping for less, rather than more, earners among whom to divide the sum total of earnings?

A lot of games, maybe even most, basically "earn" their earnings from their players.

Since that is so obviously a zero-sum-game (or worse, given bandwidth, hosting, development, maintenance and art-asset expenses) it might be preferred to think of it as earning from quitters and losers; implying that hopefully players who actually play, and do not lose, earn from those who either lose or quit.

Apart from simply making the collecting of recurring account fees or membership fees from the players a less frenetic activity by making it something infrequent rather than something that is constantly looming as an upcoming bill to pay, the idea of having a recurring fee per player-account per span of time use a larger span of time, such as yearly instead of monthly or monthly instead of weekly or weekly instead of daily or even daily instead of hourly can partly be due to a desire to increase the span of time over which it is to be decided whether any given player is a "loser" or "quitter" rather than an actually-earning "player".

I suppose we could invent another label in there too, by thinking of folk who might currently not yet have "come out ahead" financially but have not "quit" and maybe even imagine think or hope that they might yet turn out not to be a "loser".

In #Splinterlands for example I have not yet earned back what it cost me initially to get into the game. Will I ever? Am I a "loser" or whatever label we choose to use for players described in the previous paragraph? We could call them "speculators" maybe, or even, recognising that speculators are often considered to be a category of investors, "investors", albeit investors who might yet end up as "losers".

It has been suggested before that it might make sense for the #Galactic-Milieu's text-mode interface #CoffeeMUD to have an annual fee per player-account rather than some shorter-term fee such as a monthly fee; the idea being that it might be easier to figure out an average half-way level of earnings an account could be expected to bring in in half a year than to figure that out for a shorter period such as half a month. Also having the expected time it ought to take for an account to "break even" be longer might lead to more "quitters", thus more potential "earnings" for those who do not quit and do manage to meet or exceed the expected half-way-point income level.

Basically if a new account typically "breaks even" in only half a month, more potential "quitters" might "stick it out" that long before quitting.

This kind of thinking assumes, of course, that we can actually figure out, or actually compute, the average amount an average account ought to be able to "rake in" over a given span of time.

If a game's business model truly is such that all its income comes from its players (including quitters and losers), it at least does thus have an incentive for players to want there to be more players.

Looking around the world of gaming and doing a bit of thinking though it kind of seems that maybe there is at least to some extent a business model "out there" in which basically the income comes from "venture capitalists" or some such thing; the model being that some huge sum of startup capital is obtained out of which at least some of the earnings enjoyed by players is drawn. At least initially, if only to draw in an initial population of players.

Venture capital is to an extent itself a game apparently, a game whose players actually expect to lose more often than they win. So maybe preying upon venture capitalists as your main players from whom your game earns is a perfectly legitimate business model.

The Galactic-Milieu, though, is not designed to rely upon venture capital. Rather, it is designed to be "self funding" as online marketers like to say. It somehow manages to bring in enough earnings to pay its bills or it slows down its operations to a point at which it can pay its bills. For example planets are not put online unless hosting and bandwidth enough to run them has been obtained.

A major source of revenue for the #Galactic-Milieu is in fact monthly fees, as its "Galactic Hosting Corp" ( #GHC ) charges #FreeCiv Civilisations a per-square-mile monthly fee which in-game is regarded as the cost to a political party or royal family or despot or emperor or whatever to maintain control of a Civilisation.

Those fees are billed monthly to a balance that is maintained using the same hourly-compounding interest rate that the galactic finance Corps use for the loans extended to the intergalactic mining Corps implemented using the O-game-clone "XNova Redesigned".

The #FreeCiv aspect of the #Galactic-Milieu can afford to use monthly billing because there is "collateral" involved; the Civilisations own the #GHC shares that are used as collateral so if the player or players controlling a Civilisation lets that Civilisation's hosting-fees account lapse its #GHC shares can be liquidated.

Nowadays apparently what a "Civilisation" boils down to is its #GHC shares. As long as you still have #GHC shares remaining you can be a "government in exile" even if you have no square miles, cities or units remaining on any of the #FreeCiv planets of the #Galactic-Milieu. The Italians I met earlier on the #CrossCiv "Galactic Diplomacy Planet" are probably such a "government in exile".

Once you run out of #GHC shares any remaining cities simply sell themselves, along with their units, to any other Civilisation willing to buy them, no matter how low a price buyers are willing to pay. The Civilisation thus ceases to exist, no old guard holdouts of the old regime lurking somewhere on a smaller scale of play retaining "political capital" in form of #GHC shares with which to stage a comeback. Any comeback from that point would have to be a start-from-scratch.

Starting from scratch is a whole 'nother topic I'll try not to get into in this post. :)

Because the hosting fees charged by #GHC are paid with #cryptocurrency the #FreeCiv level of play does still have potential to earn from "quitters" and "losers" in that players do not have to use assets they earned within the game to get into that level of play or maintain themselves at that level of play, they can use assets obtained elsewhere such as by purchasing them on the #Stellar platform or the #HORIZON platform.

Those hosting fees were originally set at a level which should hopefully have been enough, way back then, to allow fully immersive 3-D environments to be set up depicting all those "square miles". It is still expected to be years yet before such a "virtual reality" representation is set up so #GHC rakes in much much more in fees than it currently has to pay out for servers and bandwidth for the represenations thus far deployed, so almost all of what it rakes in goes into its "treasury", from which is computed the value-per-share of its shares. The value per share thus keeps increasing, so that depending on what proportion of the total number of shares a Civilisation owns it could potentially be building up more added value in the shares it owns than it is paying out in hosting fees.

All of this though still boils down to players earning from other players; a zero-sum (or worse) game. What is intended to ultimately make the #Galactic-Milieu "different" is its bringing in of funds from other sources than the players themselves. Which is probably a topic to leave for another post, as this post is getting quite long. :)