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Hey everyone! Today I'm going to write something about my journey to financial freedom through gaming. I'm inspired for this post by @sudeon's post, so definitly feel free to check that one out aswell! I recognized a lot of aspects from his post in my own journey, but I promise it ofcourse won't just be an adapted version of his! :)

Me as a child

I started to play games around the age of 7. First it were games which I lended from the library. So I had to return them after 1 month or if I extend the date of return, I could hold them 6 weeks in total. This was ofcourse not that long. For my nineth birthday, I received my first own game. I can remember it as it was yesterday. It was Age Of Empires II: The age of kings.

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Although I really liked the game (I played hundred of hours of it and I still have it laying around at my home), I missed something and that was gaming with my friends from school. They didn't have the game so at that age we couldn't figure it out how to play together. When I was about 10 years old, one of my friends at that time, started to talk about Runescape, an MMORPG

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This game, was really the start of my gaming adventure. I don't know how many hours I played this game, but it will have been thousands. I wasn't really the grinding player, in Runescape, you had to level up to advance through the game and usually it was by clicking a lot. But I just leveled up the skills to do quests and try some monsterhunting. Rather soon than late, I discovered that I could make some ingame money through flipping (buying items low and selling them higher) on the 'Grand Exchange', which was the market place. So slowly I managed to accumulate some mills and eventually even bills with which I could buy some discontinued items. (These were items given away for certain events and these were tradeable. Since those events were limited in time, like for example Halloween, those items were scarce and their prices rose over time.)

At the end of my secondary school I started to loose interest in Runescape and discovered another type of game: League Of Legends. This game is a MOBA in which 2 teams of 5 players battle against eachother while using a different champion of which each one has his own abilities.

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Why this long introduction?

You may be wondering, what does all of this has to do with 'financial independance'? Well, that's a good question. After playing LOL a couple of years, it got me bored aswell so I started to search for another game. I stumbled upon the term play-2-earn games. It got me thinking: After playing videogames for 20 years, I only lost money while playing them. Except maybe for Runescape in which I broke even, by selling the discontinued items I earned some money. But I also paid quite some money to become and stay 'member', which made the map was bigger with more quests and available skills etc.

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My play 2 earn journey

So I started my jouney and read about Axie Infinity. There was 1 big threshhold for me though: you had to make an investment before you could start to earn. The needed investment was too big for me when I looked up the prices of some Axies, so I never started to play that game.

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The next game I discovered was Splinterlands. I discovered that I just had to buy a Spellbook for $10. Comparing this to other games, $10 to play a game seemed fair to me. The cards to play were also quite affordable, atleast to be able to start. I found $5 laying around on my Paypal and together with a coupon of $5 from Paypal, which was some kind of promo, I bought my spellbook. As p2e, crypto and nft's were all new to me, I decided I didn't want to further invest into them. So I started my journey as a freebie Splinterlands player. I discovered from the first day on that the community of Splinterlands was really awesome. I got some cards for free and also got some cards rented out to me for free. This made the experience even nicer, especially when I compared it to the quite toxic community of LOL.

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After discovering Splinterlands, I started to discover the Hive blockchain and so more the blogging aspect. I started to write my first blogposts and figured out I could fund my Splinterlands adventure through writing articles. I'm still glad I found out about Splinterlands, you can read more about why am I playing Splinterlands in this article: Why do I play Splinterlands

About 1 year ago, to be more precise: I joined their Discord server on 10/03/2022, I discovered another play 2 earn game on Hive: Wrestling Organization Online. This is a play-to-earn business management game where players can build their Organization by acquiring wrestlers, upgrading facilities, and competing to earn more of the game's own token $WOO. To read more in depth about WOO, I advise you to check out their White Paper here.

I think WOO is a project which has the heart at the right place, litteraly. They are trying to improving the wrestler space a bit better than how they found it. You can read about what kind of mess the Wrestling industry is in this post of @grindan. I think it's a well-written article showing what WOO means with an industry in crisis.

So far I managed to increase my wealth on Hive aswell utilising those play-2-earn games besides trying to blog every now and than. Although I should write more often, it's still something. How I managed to increase my wealth? Check out my other article about: How to earn free $WOO

A sidenote I have to make though is that I ended up investing some money into Hive aswell, which is a bit contrasting with my intention of not investing any fiat in the cryptocurrency. BUT I started my story with the other games I used to play, like Runescape. Well when I quit Runescape, I bought discontinued items, which arose in value over time. So when I sold them a couple of months ago I managed to get $300 worth of crypto for them. Combining this with some other ways of earning crypto, I managed to get a wallet worth a few thousands of dollars, so this is already quite an improvement in my eyes.

Conclusion

I still have a long way to go to achieve financial independance, but I'm 100% sure that play-2-earn gaming will help me in my goal.
If you would like to check out Splinterlands, feel free to use my referal link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=stekene
If you would like to check out Wrestling Organization Online, feel free to join their discord: https://discord.gg/woogame

I hope you enjoyed this article! Feel free to follow me for more posts about Splinterlands, WOO, play-earn,...