HOW TO EARN MONEY FROM GAMES

You’ve probabl heard of sites where you can play games for gift cards and cash. Are they legit? Which are the best? And how much can you really make?

What if I told you that you can get paid to play video games online?

You’d probably think it sounds sketchy.

Don’t worry, I had the same reaction. After all, it sounded too good to be true; I mean, who would pay you to play videogames, and why? How much can you really make, and is it safe?

To find out, I investigated around two dozen popular games-for-cash sites. As it turns out, most of them are pretty sketchy, having paid for fake user reviews to lure users into sites that never pay out.

However, four of them stood out to me as honest, legitimate, and maybe even worthy of your time.

Let’s investigate some legit games-for-cash apps.

Here are some apps-

Where to play – Android, iOS, and swagbucks.com.
Typical payout – ~$2-$3 per hour.
Cost to play – Free (most games).
Payout method – Gift cards via email, cash via PayPal.

Swagbucks is perhaps the web’s #1 venue for taking surveys, watching videos, and playing games for cash online. The platform is well-built, well-reviewed, and available for Android, iOS, and through your Internet browser.

Upon arriving at Swagbucks’ games hub, you’ll notice that some games offer cash and some offer cash back. It’s worth clarifying that if you play popular games like Trivial Pursuit and Bejeweled 2 through Swagbucks you won’t get paid, but SB will offer you a small rebate for cash you spend inside the games.

In the second category, Swagbucks will actually pay you in cash or gift cards to play certain games. Some are recognizable, like Forge of Empires and Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. Since you’re effectively playtesting these games for developers, Swagbucks will pay you the equivalent of ~$2 per hour in points, which can be redeemed once you earn around $5 for a gift card or PayPal transfer.

Swagbucks’ competitive advantage is the variety of non-game activities. As you accumulate points towards your next payout threshold, you can take a break from games and watch videos, take surveys, and more.

Where to play – Android.
Typical payout – $2-$5 per hour.
Cost to play – Free.
Payout method – Gift cards via email, including Visa, Amazon, Steam, and more.

Mistplay pays you to play new Android games and provide developers with feedback based upon your experience. Each 2- to 10-minute gaming session can reward the cash equivalent of $0.66, and you can begin cashing out your points as early as $5. Mistplay will then email you your gift card within 48 hours.

Mistplay pays out a little above average, and I admire the platform for being both developer- and user-friendly. First, to benefit developers who test their games through Mistplay, the app accelerates cash earnings the longer you test a game, so you’re incentivized to play longer and provide better feedback to its creators. Second, Mistplay offers users a feature called the “Mix” whereby it’ll generate a playlist of gaming experiences based upon your genre preferences (puzzle, platforming, action, etc.).

In total, Mistplay is a great place for gamers to test new games and help out developers while earning a trickle of cash for their efforts. As far as games-for-cash sites go, Mistplay seems among the most wholesome and well-intentioned.

Where to play – Android and iOS.
Typical payout – 0.1% APY plus jackpots ranging from $100 to $1,000,000.
Cost to play – Free for 30-days, then $3 monthly (waived if you set up automatic savings).
Payout method – Direct deposit into savings.

Long Game is best described as a gamified savings account. When you make a deposit into your Long Game account, whether automatic or manual, Long Game will reward you with coins that you can use to play games for cash rewards. Founded by a California-based Millennial looking to inspire young people to save, Long Game offers a free 30-day trial and stays free as long as you use Direct Deposit. What’s also nice is that all of your money is FDIC-insured.

The industry average APY these days is around 1.0% and Long Game’s is 0.1%. That extra 0.9% interest is effectively what funds Long Game’s jackpots. All of the bank’s games are chance-based, so you’re essentially exchanging your 0.9% interest for a chance to win daily payouts ranging from $100 to $1,000,000.

For young savers, 0.9% APY is a pretty small amount to “gamble,” so if the lure of getting more coins to play games incentivizes you to save more in the long run, Long Game might be a good fit. Plus, if you make $1,000 in the Long Game slots one day, you could make up that 0.9% APY gap and then some!

Where to play – Android and inboxdollars.com.
Typical payout – $1-$2 per hour.
Cost to play – Free.
Payout method – Gift cards via email, cash via PayPal.

Inbox Dollars, like Swag bucks, is a popular destination for making a trickle of cash online. The site offers surveys, videos, and of course, games as ways to earn a few cents to a few bucks per hour.

Available as a site and Android app (the iOS app is for surveys only), Inbox Dollars makes up for below-average payout amounts with a sheer variety of games to play. Their extensive library includes classics like solitaire, mahjong, and sudoku, but also new mobile games in need of testing.

If you’re already addicted to simple browser and mobile games like the ones listed above, Inbox Dollars might be a no-brainer. After all, an hour or two a day could pay for your HBO and Netflix subscriptions.

Plus, if you tire of games, you can also switch over to videos or survey-taking as ways to accumulate Inbox Dollars on your way to their $30 minimum threshold. It’ll take a while, but at least you’ll have plenty of ways to get there.

Now that I’ve shared four apps that I think are worth your time, here are three that aren’t. Out of the dozens of apps I investigated, I’m shining a spotlight on this ignominious trifecta because their shadiness was the most well-hidden. These three sites and apps appear legit at first, but there’s something more mischievous, even sinister underneath their facades.

Bananatic

No single violation disqualified Bananatic from this list. Rather, it was more of a “death by 1,000 cuts” situation, since everywhere I looked I got an uneasy vibe from this site.

Everything about Bananatic looks legit at first glance. According to Similar Web, the site has over a quarter-million visitors per month plus a similar number of Likes on Facebook, and the BananApp (as it’s called) received plenty of five-star reviews on the Play Store. Plus, the site itself looks pretty legit and well-designed, almost like a rival to Steam.

However, the plot thickens as I pulled back the curtain. Despite having 256,000 Facebook Likes, nobody engages with their content, posted at precisely 9 AM every four days. Many of their five-star reviews on the Play Store sound fake, and when a real human publishes a legit one-star review, Bananatic responds “Please change or delete your opinion.”

If their overall shadiness wasn’t enough, Banatic pays out slower than average, and who knows what they do with your personal information. So for those reasons, I recommend you seek sanctuary in Mistplay instead.

Givling

Givling was the last games-for-cash site to be ejected from my final list. It wasn’t easy, because I cheered for Givling. I wanted the app to be as good as it sounded.

But like a well-written Game of Thrones character, Givling lured me in with initial likeability, only to betray me with its darker nature.

In my defense, it’s hard not to admire Givling after hearing its elevator pitch. It’s a trivia app where the semi-weekly winners split a $50,000 jackpot to help pay off their mortgage or student loans. Players really do receive the money, which mostly comes from sponsors.

Mostly.

See, the problem with Givling is that you can’t just log in tomorrow, win the week’s trivia, and receive the jackpot. Everything you do in Givling raises your place in the “queue”, and whoever’s at the top of the queue every two weeks gets the jackpot.

You can rise up the queue by watching ads and playing games, but also by buying products from Givling’s sponsors and simply handing the app money.

Do you see the problem? You essentially have to “bid” your way to the top, which explains why one woman had to spend $42,000 to win $50,000 (and countless players spend thousands for nothing).

Inevitably, in 2019 Givling got blasted by CNBC for manipulating and frisking players who were simply desperate to pay off their student loans. A Minnesota state legislator called it “gambling” while watchdog group Pyramid Scheme Alert called it “a sophisticated scheme.”

Givling would claim that they’ve since introduced a Free Queue, and much of the pay-to-play revenue goes to crowdfund someone else’s student loans, but I think these are shaky defenses; even the free queue is going to suck up too much of peoples’ time for nothing, and you shouldn’t be financing someone’s student loans by driving others deeper into debt.

Student loan debt is a crushing mental and financial burden on our generation, and I don’t think anyone should be profiting off of false hopes. If you really want to pay off your student loans sooner, don’t buy lottery tickets or waste time on Givling; start a side hustle.

Lucky Day

Lucky Day was endorsed by so many “Top 10 Games-For-Cash Sites” listicles that I assumed it must have some air of legitimacy. Furthermore, it offered a simple, seemingly incorruptible premise: play free virtual scratch-offs, maybe win some cash.

Even still, the app had a rather nasty trick up its sleeve, one that I alluded to earlier.

Lucky Day has a payout threshold of $10. When you collect enough points, you’re supposed to head to the in-app marketplace to exchange your points for a gift card. However, users are reporting that once they reach about $9.90 worth of points, they never seem to win the last $0.10 despite weeks, months, even years of attempts.

Once you approach the threshold, the app pushes paid “upgrades” that supposedly increase your chances of earning those final $0.10 so you can finally cash out. Stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy, users spend $1, $3, then $5 on upgrades but still don’t win the final $0.10.

Meanwhile, Lucky Day continues to profit from user frustration through upgrade purchases and ad views. To add insult to injury, even the scant few users who do cross the $10 threshold report that once they do, all of the gift cards in the marketplace instantly become “out of stock” and unavailable for purchase.

Lucky Day also has a comically shady Play Store presence. Predictably, pretty much all of its reviews are scathing, with users complaining about the impassable $10 threshold and “sold out” gift cards. And yet, most of the reviews are scored five stars so the app averages 4.1. The only reason I can think of why users would score an app they dislike with five stars is because said app incentivized them to (fraudulently).

I hope that my descriptions of Bananatic, Givling, and Lucky Day serve as reminders that most games-for-cash sites are a waste of time at best and can fleece you out of thousands at worst. If you’re really interested in experimenting with this type of website, you’ll find safer havens in the four that I’ve highlighted.

VISHESH KUMAR

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VISHESH KUMAR