Farm Satoshi is actually very well designed from what I can tell and my eleven year old enjoys playing it (under my supervision). It's a farming game using satoshis as the game unit of currency with the option of cashing out those satoshis to a real wallet.
Can something similar be developed for Piggy with a few changes? The changes that would make the experience even better are:
1. Allow for more than one account per household/IP address. I have more than one child that would enjoy playing.
2. Use PIGGY as unit of currency instead of satoshis--allow cash out to actual PIGGY wallet. Goes without saying but don't tie it to Xapo.
3. Ad free would be nice, but I understand that ads provide revenue, so ads OK. Maybe have an ad free upgrade version you pay for once (with PIGGY of course).
4. Do not make leveling up dependent on gaining referrals. Referral bonuses are OK, but kids should be able to play the game fully without having referrals. The game earnings don't have to be huge either, just positive. The real value of the game is in the learning--it's a nice little lesson on economics.
5. Have a parents' umbrella account which allows for the parents to reward their children for "in real life" accomplishments by sending PIGGY to their game accounts.
6. Allow the parents (both of them) to play too--the game is really fun.
7. Tie in other types of learning within the game, maybe science about the various animals.
8. Expand it to allow for growing crops and other farm economic activities--can also include plant science lessons.
Basically, what I'm suggesting is create a similar quest based learning game as Farm Satoshi with PIGGY as the currency.
How about it?
Good idea. Since I imagine the game should be revenue positive or at least neutral for the game devs, I would assume advertising should be used to support it (to provide funding for the piggycoins earned playing the game), or the ad-free purchase fee you mention.
I haven't actually seen the Farm Satoshi game, but I imagine that one could also have upgrade options (paying for various items/enhancements within the game with Piggycoins) that would also help balance things out.
One neat thing about this idea is that if constructed right, it might be possible to create additional "modules" to the game that provide teaching/instruction on many different topics, without a whole lot of additional effort.