How INK Games Compares to Other Money-Making Opportunities in Gaming

By Shaan Khan

Gaming is the most lucrative entertainment industry worldwide, overshadowing the box office with over three times the revenue.

With an estimated revenue of $178.73 Billion in 2021, the gaming industry has a lot of money to go around. Investors, corporate execs, video game devs—they all get a steak in the profits.

However, there is another group that gets a slice of gaming revenue pie and those are people that make money by… playing video games! 

How can this be possible, you ask? Since typically, people who play video games spend money on them—not profit off them?!

Well, opportunities do exist that are great solutions to the diminishing returns of gaming that some face; where you spend money, time and energy on playing video games but feel deflated long-term because of the lack of real-world benefits.

Making money gaming is now a form of valuable productivity. Still, most ways to make money gaming are a convoluted process that takes hard work—it can feel like a full-time job and educational course wrapped into one.

INK Games aims to revolutionise making money by playing video games. This is through streamlining the process and making it as effortless as posting a TikTok video or Tweet but with levels to expenditure that offer challenging fun.

To delve into this exciting new method of making money gaming by INK Games, let’s start by comparing the other popular methods of making money gaming that came before and soon to be challenged once INK Games releases their flagship IP, Prize Kingdoms—a mobile game launching soon this year.

Gaming Content Creator

A gaming content creator is an individual ready to put themselves and their gameplay experience on a pedestal in the public eye, hoping people will pay attention to them.

It’s a brave act and attracting the positive attention you want doesn’t come easy. You’ve got to be engaging, entertaining and informative. If you can pull it off, people reward you with money for being a positive part of their day.

The so-called pedestal to which we can show off our gaming experiences to others is the internet, on a variety of its platforms. Some of the main ones include:

• YouTube – A video-sharing platform where users can record their gaming experience and post it online for others to watch. You can profit from companies sponsoring or playing ads on your videos.

• Twitch – A streaming platform users can broadcast their gameplay live to an audience. Viewers can donate or pay subscriptions to live streamers. 

• Gaming Journalism – Publication websites that host articles & blogs about gaming in general and the writer’s experiences with specific games. Publications will pay writers for their content that brings traffic to their websites via SEO.

To have the ability to be a content creator for any of these platforms, you need to invest in media equipment. This can include cameras, microphones, capture devices, mixers, etc.

Next, there is the cost of software. These can range from Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Grammarly, Office 365 and OBS.

The standards for media equipment are on the rise, with the most popular gaming content creators spending up to tens of thousands of dollars on them alone. You also need to be well-versed in operating the media equipment, which comes down to your level of patience to undergo online lessons and deal with trial-and-error.

Finally, you must attract people to your content, but the market of content creators is oversaturated. In 2020, YouTube reported they had over 40 million active gaming channels. While on Twitch, over 76% of streamers were yet to earn any money from the platform.

Not only is competition fierce, but platforms such as YouTube and Twitch restrict new content creators from making any money until they meet popularity requirements, i.e. a minimum threshold of viewers, subscribers and hours spent creating content.

It can take months or years to secure a steady fanbase that power you to profit from content creation, so consistency, talent and quality are key if you want to stand out from the rest and watch your numbers grow.

Quality Assurance (QA) Tester

This opportunity is the oldest on the list and plays a major role in game development. Unlike the other opportunities, a QA Tester makes money by playing video games still in development. Their task is to identify & report technical issues in the game for the dev team to fix.

The role is satisfying, knowing your direct efforts lead to the game’s stability that people worldwide can enjoy once released. However, there are downsides.

You’re likely not going to enjoy playing the incomplete game because it lacks polish, has missing features and riddled with bugs unlike the stable & finished product.

The content you do create is technical reports which don’t require creativity. Instead, you need to be strictly objective with each report.

Some QA Tester roles lead you to work directly under a reputable company who pay you a stable salary. You need to clock in work hours and follow a list of responsibilities. Flexibility is limited unlike the other opportunities on this list. Your qualifications, CV, cover letter, work experience and interview skills all matter when trying to land your first job as a QA Tester.

Most say the hardest part of the job is when the development of a game reaches crunch time, when many QA Testers are pushed to their limits close to the game’s launch date—this can mean working extra hours with some companies not offering an increase in their salaries within this stressful timeframe.

Esports

Competitive online gaming has come a long way from the LAN Tournaments for Quake and Halo back in the early 2000s. Esports has a market value of $1 billion, with tournaments today pulling in millions of views. VentureBeat reported in 2021 that over 234 million people were Esports enthusiasts.

The audience for Esports is huge and it’s no longer a handful of competitive games that draw in the whole crowd. Instead, multiple genres have a widespread of games with a competitive esports scene. The primary genres & games include:

• First-Person Shooters (FPS) – Counter-Strike Global Offensive, VALORANT, Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite

• Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) – World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV

• Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) – League of Legends, Dota 2, Arena of Valor

The major tournaments for these genres & games have prize pools over millions of dollars. This might excite you, but you must be one of the most skilled players in the world to win money this big.

However, platforms such as Skillz host tournaments for millions of gamers to enter and have the chance to compete and win prizes.

Making money via Esports is becoming more accessible. However, your success will always depend on your skill level which takes practice to grow to the limits of where your natural talent can take you.

INK Games

To break down, INK Games will be a video game platform like Steam or Epic Games, where all game publishers & developers can use to host their video games for users to access them.

The key difference between INK Games and other video game platforms is that users can only access a game if they receive an invite code. Once users gain access, they can now send out invite codes to other users to join the game.

For each user that joined the game via your invite, any money they spend in-game on microtransactions will go directly to you. 

You also earn money based on your viral impact. Suppose the users you invited go on to invite other people themselves. In that case, those connections will be linked to your original invite—building up a percent of additional earnings that reflect the reach of your connection.

Publishers & developers will have a significant viral impact being the first ones to send out invite codes. INK Games also becomes a useful tool for marketing since users are financially incentivised by INK Games to spread the word about a game they are playing on the platform.

INK Games is an exciting way to grow a games player base where creators and players both benefit with equal opportunity to earn more than others based on their viral impact, which is the meta-game outside of the video game.

This only scratches at the surface of how you can earn money via INK Games. The company also want to produce & host IPs that have in-game marketplaces where players can trade, sell and buy virtual assets and zip codes with real money—injecting real-world economy into fiction worlds that grow the capital of players.

In contrast to the other money-making opportunities on this list, INK Games is an all-in-one platform where money-making and gaming are both heavily engrained into the platform and don’t require you to learn a set of new skills in a new profession.

INK Games makes it easy for you to make money at its baseline. However, you have the option to earn more by being more influential, especially through social media. INK Games could encourage you to grow your follower bases and become more social—perhaps doing more than what you typically do but nothing completely out of the ordinary.

The platform is ambitious with a target reach of over 3 billion players and we will soon find out more once the company launches their mobile game Prize Kingdoms.