As my take on "play to earn" evidently differs from what seem to be the "norms", I'll try in this post to give at least some glimpses into my own thinking on the genre.
For starters, a big part of my original thinking on the matter had to do with discouraging "griefing" in games by trying to ensure players have "skin in the game", something to lose, something hopefully sufficiently valuable or important to them that the risk of losing it could potentially serve as an effective discouragement of "griefing".
Thus my first thoughts were along the lines of requiring at least an initial fee to play even if not an ongoing fee such as a subscription, with the bulk of those fees going into some kind of earning or interest-bearing mechanism so that the longer the player kept playing the larger the eventual payment they could be refunded if or when they "honourably-discharged" themselves, a refund they would not be eligible for were they "dishonourably discharged" and that thanks to the earning or interest-bearing mechanism could well be larger than the original fee, ideally of course significantly larger.
The big "catch" I ran into with that of course lay in finding a suitable and reliable "earning or interest-bearing mechanism" to plug into that model.
It did not take a whole lot of empirical testing to determine that so-called "HYIPs" (High Yield Interest Programs) were not dependable for such a purpose.
Thus the challenge ever since has been to find or construct suitable plug-in "earning or interest-bearing" mechanisms.
Eventually of course, bitcoin was invented, wherein "mining" is an absolutely literal "money making" mechanism.
Aha, thought I, maybe at last this play-to-earn idea might be do-able!
Suffice to say that with the advent and proliferation of crypto, "earning mechanisms" aplenty are nowadays readily available.
This of course led to a new challenge: why bother to play games to earn rather than directly accessing the underlying earning mechanism(s)?
Anyone who might upon occasion have wondered why the Galactic Milieu has thus far not followed the crypto "fashion" of publishing a "whitepaper" might possibly give some thought to that challenge themselves, maybe they can provide some useful thoughts upon the matter.
The overall model is basically to have games intervene between earning-mechanisms and end-users (players), so ultimately play to earn games constructed according to such a model fundamentally amount to yet another form of "middleware" coming between the spigots and the wannabe-guzzlers.
Presumably the general tendency here in the bitcointalk forum would be to disintermediate the middleware and go directly to the faucets/spigots.
Thus arises the possibility that providing "whitepapers" detailing the spigots/faucets might be counterproductive...
-MarkM-