Play-to-earn gaming sounds too good to be true. It probably is.

polygon.com:

Jared Galloway, a 22-year-old in Seattle, makes his living with a virtual horse. There’s this browser-based PC game called Zed Run, developed by the Australian studio Virtually Human, that takes place in a sinister cyberpunk dystopia where computerized racehorses compete for the podium on a purple, Tron-like grid. Players can buy and breed those “stallions” with the institutional guarantee that their ownership rights are encoded on the blockchain (all exchanges are done in cryptocurrency). The goal is to acquire a powerful horse that can win races and collect stud fees from those who want access to their precious digital genetics. Think of it as the entire equine industry pared down into a phantom, online-only economy.

This all might sound inscrutable — most tendrils of the Web3 revolution are — but all you really need to know is that Galloway was scraping by as a pool boy before he was tempted to try Zed Run, and purchased a promising horse off the open market. His life hasn’t been the same since.

“I started playing the game and bought [a horse] that was unnamed and unraced for 1.1 ethereum, which was about $4,000 at the time,” said Galloway. “Then I got an offer [from someone to buy it] for three Ethereum, and three days later [the offer] went up to five, and then eight. I looked at who was making these offers, and it was the biggest racer in Zed Run.”

Galloway made the decision to hold onto the horse for himself so he could race it and breed it. “I thought, ‘If the best racer in the game wants my horse, then there must be something to it,’” he added.

Galloway said he made $4,000 last month fromZed Run, which means he has lapped his initial investment. In total, his horse, named Diamondz, has netted him a profit of