The Gamer Economy Is the New Creator Economy
In his 2020 talk on the future of gaming, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, outlined 3 trends he saw on the horizon:
Gaming as a social experience
Gaming as a platform for discourse
Gaming as an economy.
It was the last point that really caught my attention. He said,
“We really need to start thinking about games, not just as entertainment experiences but as an economy where other creators can participate, contribute, and have their ideas heard.”
It reminded me Packy McCormick’s essay about the Pokémon-like, web3-native game Axie Infinity. In it he writes,
“Axie is building more than a game; it’s building a virtual nation with its own economy. But it all starts with the game.”
It clicked: games like Axie are an experiment on what happens if a company can reward virtual activities and currency with real-world economics.
We’re in the the early stages of the gamer economy. 1
The gamer economy isn’t just about playing games for entertainment. Riffing off of the passion and creator economies, the gamer economy takes “make money doing work you love” to another level:
Passion economy: Make money doing work you love
Creator economy: Make money making content you love
Gamer economy: Make money playing games you love
While the creator economy revolves around content creators and influencers who derive their income from making content online, the gamer economy niches that down to folks who make money through online games, doing things like…
Flipping League of Legends accounts
Streaming Call of Duty games
Buying, selling, and breeding Axie Infinity pets
Like the creator economy, the best thing about this frontier of the economy is that a player can transfer their online success into real world cash. In his essay, Packy writes about Axie players’ earning potential:
The top PvP players can earn up to 600 SLP a day, but for the typical worker, the max is around 200, which translates to $52 at the current SLP price of $0.26. In the US, that’s not a ton of money, but over $1,500 per month is a meaningful and potentially life-changing amount of money in many developing nations.
Gaming acronyms aside, $1,500 per month is the equivalent of a top tier salary for a knowledge worker working at a CPG in the Philippines, where the minimum wage is $15 a day or $300 a month.
That is insane. As a kid from the Philippines, I’m psyched about what this could mean for many of my countrymen living below the poverty line.
But here’s what excites me the most: The gamer economy isn’t a faraway twinkle on the horizon, a social media exec with a crystal ball peering years into the future.
It’s already here.
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FootnoteFor clarity, I use the term “gamer economy” to refer to the broader economic trend, not the “gaming economy” because that typically refers to the gaming industry as a whole. ↩︎