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An Experiment in Making Money with Passive Gaming
I’ve always been interested in ways to make money with passive income. I’ve had varying degrees of success with it in the past but it never occurred to me until recently that I might be able to make money from gaming and make it passive.
If you’re interested in making money through games while doing little to no work, you should keep reading. I’m going to explain what passive income is and then I’m going to tell you how I’m going to make it apply to gaming.
What is Passive Income?
Passive income is any way you can earn money by doing very little work or sometimes, no work at all. Investing in the stock market can be considered passive. Owning and renting out a rental home is somewhat passive. Writing ebooks is passive once you’ve done the work at the beginning.
I’ve been obsessed with passive income ever since I learned about it. Basically, I’m lazy and I like making money while I sleep. LOL. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. In fact, it’s a slow burn and you have to have huge amounts of patience to see results from most passive income earners. But the idea that I can make money while I’m going about my business, living my life, sleeping, or even when I’m at my every day job, is very appealing to me.
In the past (and currently) I make passive income from:
- writing articles on revenue sites (in the past I’ve used HubPages, Squidoo, InfoBarrel and I’ve even owned/managed a group of writing sites with a partner; interestingly enough, I have/had articles at HubPages that I completely forgot about and they are closing out this coming year and paying everyone whatever is owed to them, even if they aren’t at payout so I’ve passively earned about $40-ish US and will get paid for it)
- writing ebooks and publishing on Amazon, GooglePlay, Apple, etc.; I haven’t published much on any of these ebook retailers in the past years but I still get around $50 a month)
- rental house – I’ve had tenants in a rental house for year but the current tenants are the best; they never ask for a thing and they are paying my mortgage and eventually I’ll have complete ownership of the house and will have had someone else pay for a signification portion of it)
But…
Gaming? It never occurred to me until recently that I could make gaming income almost completely passive.
Now, to be fair, there is only one “game” involved in this strategy. The other sources of income aren’t so much gaming as gaming adjacent activities. But that’s ok. There’s a game and it’s passive so I’ll go with it.
The Passive Gaming Income Strategy
I will forewarn you by telling you that this strategy involves your mobile phone and it does suck up a lot of battery. If you’re not ok with the fact that you’re going to have to charge your battery several times a day because you’re running several apps at once, this is not the strategy for you.
One of the keys to this is NOT overcharging your batter. Overcharging is hard on your phone and on your battery and if you do it all the time, it will decrease your battery life. Instead, as needed, charge your battery to about 90%. Then unplug it for a while. Your battery will have a longer lifespan.
Now, in this experiment, I am running three apps at once.
The gaming aspect comes with a gaming app that you make money from and a game app that will eventually make money. The third app lets you play music in the background and make money from it.
By running all three of these apps at the same time, I’m maximizing my passive income. While I’m running these apps, I’m doing other things. In fact, as I write this article, I’m making money with these apps, right now! I’ve also journalled, folded and put away laundry, cleaned my office, and even cooked dinner while running the three apps to make passive gaming income while I’m just living my life.
What are these apps, you ask? I know, I know. Get to the good stuff! Ok, here are the three apps I’m using to maximize passive gaming income in the laziest way possible.
#1 MistPlay
I’ve talked about MistPlay before. It’s one of my top three apps for making money from gaming. It’s not the top earner but it’s the one I keep coming back to because it pays out consistently, it has a wide variety of games to play and there are no time limits (like some apps where you have to reach a certain amount of levels within a specific period of time). In fact, in order to save space on my phone, I often delete games. With MistPlay though, you can add the games back if you want to play them again and you just keep on earning.
So, MistPlay hosts the game that I play. When I play any game on MistPlay, I earn gems when I go up in levels/spend time in the game. In this specific case, it’s just time in the game. If I launch the game through MistPlay and let it track my time, I’m earning income in the most passive way possible.
#2 Atlas Earth
Atlas Earth has been around for quite some time. Actually, I tried it once before. It’s one of the games I downloaded when I first started using MistPlay but I deleted it pretty quickly because I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t give it much of a chance.
Recently, it popped up on an ad that was running in another app while I was playing a game (and let’s be honest, ads are just part of the whole making money playing mobile games experience) and I caved and downloaded it. That’s when I remembered that I had tried it on MistPlay in the past. I little notification popped up that I should launch it with MistPlay to enable tracking. I did.
Now, it’s possible that Atlas Earth might be the original idle game. Maybe not but it’s been around for a very long time. It has a 4.5 star rating on Google Play with more than 240,000 reviews. That’s pretty good.
Making Money with Atlas Earth
The idea of the game is that you “buy” plots of land and generate income from them. You get your first 100 Atlas Bucks (AB) for free when you sign up to the game and a plot of land is, you got it, $100 AB.
One plot of land is not going to earn you much money though. I can’t even estimate how long it would take to get to the $5 payout with only one plot of land. Years probably, by which point you’d have totally forgotten about the game.
You need to buy more plots of land. There are two ways to do this. Buy AB with real money or find a way to earn more AB. Assuming that you aren’t into spending money on games (I don’t like to either although, I admit, I have in the past), you’ll have to earn AB in other ways.
Fortunately, earning AB is not difficult. You can do surveys, check in, watch ads, or even play other games. This is where the “very little work” comes in. It’s not completely passive if you want to maximize you opportunities to earn through Atlas Bucks. But you can focus on the things that take as little work as possible.
These include:
- daily check-ins
- boost your income 20x by watching up to 6 times to get up to 6 hours of boosted income
- watch an ad to get a free AB (you can watch one every 20 minutes if you want)
- collect diamonds (reminds me of catching Pokemon except way easier; just turn on the app from time to time; walk down the street or park at the furthest spot in the parking lot; I find a lot of them in the mall parking lots) which can then be used to spin the wheel and get AB
These are minimal things that can help you get more AB so you can buy more plots of land and generate rental income faster.
Atlas Earth Is A Slow Burn Game
Now, yes, I realize that it will still take some time before I actually see money from this game. It’s a slow-burn game though. And I’m not putting much effort into it. I’m literally opening the game through MistPlay and just letting it run on my phone most of the time. But even if it’s not open on my phone it’s still making money, little by little.
I am on day 4 of playing Atlas Earth and I’m much more interested in it this time. I haven’t cashed out but I now have 4 plots of land (three are my house and the other is my work) and I can see the rental income increasing faster; especially if I have boosted the earning rate.
As you progress in the game there are other ways to maximize your income. You can play mini-games within the game and you can watch for super-boosts. You can purchases badges. Yes, it takes time to learn about all the ways you can play Atlas Earth, but once you figure it out, you can generate real money by doing very little.
#3 Earn App by Mode
This last is a variety app. You can make money by playing game but I downloaded it for the music. You can make money by playing games, completing offers (like signing up for a trial of Ancestory) watching videos (ads), doing surveys, charging your phone – and yes, listening to music.
The music is what I came back for.
I downloaded this app earlier this year because there was a free trial of their Earn Club plan, which lets you make money faster. I figured I’d give the free trial a try, cash out, and delete it if I didn’t like it. But the catch is that if you don’t continue with the Earn Club plan by buying into it, you don’t get to keep the money you earned in the trial. I was so mad, I deleted the whole app without reaching payout. LOL
But, again, I saw an ad in one of the gaming apps and decided to give it another shot. Because music!
Honestly, I have music going all the time. Most of the time it is Spotifiy or Lilo (a lo-fi music app). But the music on Mode is not any different than what you might find in either of those apps. You can choose from all kinds of channels from Rap to Pop to Country and even more obscure genres like EDM or decades like 80’s Pop.
And of course, there are ads. This is how the app makes money so it can pay you. But they are no different than listening to to the radio. Actually, they are less frequent.
The beauty of the Earn App by Mode, is that music runs in the background while you’re doing whatever else you’re doing so yes, you can play it while you’re making money by playing games!
#3 Alternative – Streaming Idle Game Play and Chatting
If the idea of passively sitting and listening to music while you’re playing an idle game doesn’t appeal to you, this might be more up your alley.
You can stream your gameplay from you phone to Twitch or YouTube or TikTok or wherever you choose through a streaming app called Prism. It’s super easy to set up and you can turn your camera on or off to your liking.
But who wants to watch someone play and idle game? And watch ads?
Well, no one does. It’s pretty simple to turn down the sound on your phone and just talk though. Perhaps your followers would enjoy the opportunity to sit down and chat with you without having to compete with your attention to the game. Let’s be honest – it’s hard to focus on the chat when you’re running around shooting things!
Maybe have a themed chat. Talk about mental health, life strategies, making money or whatever you want. It can be anything you’re passionate about. Or maybe you could host an AMA – Ask Me Anything.
I haven’t tried this yet but I’m planning to give this a try in the future.
If you’re streaming somewhere you can earn money, it can be the third way you make money while playing an idle game.
Will You Try to Make Passive Income Playing Games?
This strategy of maximizing income is new to me and I’ve only been doing it for a few days. I’ll update you all when I’ve had some more time into it.
If you’re thinking that the amount of money you could earn is very minimal – you’re right. It may be. Especially at first.
But if you’re streaming gameplay of other games on platforms like Twitch, you know that takes time to build up, too. I’ve been streaming on Twitch for a year now and I’m just over $100 (should be hitting my second payout soon and in CA funds it will come to $120 and change). And I’ve put a lot of hours into it.
I’m having a good time though. I like the games I play and I love it when people come into my chat to keep me company while I play. I don’t know if I’ll ever see any significant income from streaming but I don’t really care. I mean, it would be awesome if I did but I’m having fun and that’s what matters.
The same applies to mobile gaming and passive gaming. It’s not hard. It’s kinda fun (I’m especially enjoying buying up little plots of land and I look forward to buying plots in my hometown and when I go to other places). So, it’s no loss. And to be honest, I’ve made more with mobile games than by streaming.
What do you think? Will you try this strategy? I’d love to hear about it if you do. Or if you play Atlas Earth and have some tips, please feel free to share!
