After accidentally spending a jaw-dropping two hours playing it (whoops), I earned a grand total of 842 gems.

I picked a Farmville-esque game called “Family Island ™️- Farming” because I love pseudo-productivity games where you click on things to make things to build other things. It merely claims you can earn money while playing. This app doesn’t make any huge promises, unlike some of the other ones. You can then turn the gems into gift cards, including Amazon, PayPal, Visa, Starbucks, H&M, and others. You earn “gems” for downloading the game, spending a certain amount of time playing it, leveling up, and other arbitrary “achievements” like playing it for one hour after 11 pm for some reason. Mistplay tracks the time you play the games it recommends. To earn money playing games with Mistplay, it asks you to download and play on apps. Helpfully, I was then shown additional “earn money playing games” apps in subsequent ads on those apps I downloaded. I found them by clicking on the original Tumblr ad I was served. I love working on my freelance journey, but of course, if I could really make money just by playing games, I would. Or worse - they’re just a side hustle scam.īut yesterday, I saw yet another ad as I was scrolling on Tumblr that promised to pay me real dollars if I just installed an app and played a game! (The ad showed a woman getting an $800 PayPal deposit, which, I have to admit, did sound very appealing.) Earn money playing games? Sign me up.Īfter doing some research on this income stream, it looked like many personal finance influencers thought that earning money playing games merited enough attention to fully call it a side hustle.

In my experience, the “easiest” ways to make money involve a lot of work behind the scenes, or don’t actually make money. I’m skeptical of allegedly easy ways to make money.

Casino games earn real money