Earth 2: Ponzi scheme or an in-game currency without a game?

Charitably, Earth2 is like any other over-inspired crowdfunding game project, where developers raise a couple hundred thousand dollars in exchange for an industry- or genre-defining game, which of course they are unable to deliver. You can call them naive, or scammers. Except Earth2 isn’t positioned to deliver any game at all. Their tiny development team is working to produce cinematic trailers and a web-based Google-maps tiles, and not an immersive, massive virtual world like Matrix or Ready-Player-One, or even a scaled back version of such. Producing no revenues, making it very easy to deposit money, and very difficult to withdraw money (claiming KYC regulations), it looks more like a ponzi rather than an (over) earnest effort at producing a serviceable product.

Not a scam, new partnership with Polygon and transition to blockchain based metaverse will be huge. Give it time

Very interesting article, I quite enjoyed reading it.
I’m actually studying the white papers of a similar project: nextearth and I automatically found out earth 2 and this post.
At the moment (at least to me) it’s quite unclear what kind of future development nextearth will have as well.
So far it sounds like pretty much the same as E2: massive land speculation, open marketplace to trade it, in the future hope of generating a platform where businesses and people will interact and eventually, far in the future, they’ll be able to have a VR world.
Staying in their community I saw quite a chaos in what each user think about the project…and as final line they are all wildly guessing, making their own theories and consequently “strategies”.
But nobody know what will happen with the tiles once they will start implementing more features: since most of the lands are actually owned by massive high rollers, it’s quite unclear if the early bird will get massive benefit from that (leaving newbie with the crumble of the system) or if they will end up pretty much with a fistful of nothing if the rules will change and the entire platform will become a massive game minecraft styled.
Would you consider checking them out and writing an article on their platform as well?

Compliments again for the article!

After reading the entire website, I don’t think we can completely dismiss Earth 2 as a scam. But currently there is nothing but hope and vague ideas about “something neat in the future”. So as this article points out, currently it still just amounts to a Ponzi scheme.

Anyone with sense knows that if you invest in something like this, it may or may not pan out. And that you have to be in it long-term (at least a few years). And don’t invest more than you’re willing to lose.

You dont seriously compare minecraft to earth 2? Every CS student should be able to code Minecraft in a few days, its so simple. They want to do a VR replicate of the earth. Believe me, I’m in the medical device industry working on AR / VR, and thats not how it works. Please guys, don’t be naive.

I think your column is spot on for the most part (for someone looking for a quick turn around) except when it comes to using the term “ponzi scheme.” It may be a scam, but for it to be a ponzi scheme the developer would be promising returns and taking other peoples money to pay you. This is not how the market place there works. Anyone making money is selling on the market place, not back to Earth 2.

For a long while, reviews of Earth 2 IO on trustpilot and Quora were full of positive reviews with referral codes.
as we all know, spamming referral codes and cheap YT advertising are par for course with seminar/course scams and Chinese made make money apps or paywall game apps do.
Now times are changing and the positive reviews are being diluted with honest reviews. I still see those awful commercials on YT, but hopefully the scam has been revealed enough for the devs to run away with the money.
It’s legally a game so they can do this mess. We definitely need some restrictions on anything that’s fishy like most play to make money or pay to play apps.
Most aforementioned apps are Chinese owned, directly or indirectly, and that’s scary but left for another topic.
Earth 2 IO is Australian based as far as I can ascertain with info being so hard to find.
We need regulations in how much influence foreign devs have on the market just the same as we need them for national based devs as well.

They claim in their FB add, that I saw today, that they want to make a game like Player One (the movie) basically in the future development.. If this was possible, then I could see a potential benefit of investing in a virtual property before launch. But honestly to map out an entire planet?? Come on… We are light years away from that type of sophistication in computer hardware in my opinion (correct me if I am wrong). The idea sounds awesome and enticing. But that would be the only way I would be investing in a property if this technology existed to actually create a virtual world where people could actually exist in a, lets say mansion I bought in my home town…

The game is early in the development stage and I thought it can be a scam or a Ponzi scheme. But I like the idea behind it. Many people love to build their own empires and enjoy strategy games. Earth2 promises both. It’s in the early development stage and it attracts many people who just bet on the fact the price of new tiles is rising (there are multiple sites showing the statistics about the game) so if they buy today in a few months they can sell easily to the new players. That however means they must expect new players to come. They must believe in the game and the team behind it.
I did some investigation about the team and the background – https://earth2.guide/blog/is_Earth2_a_scam/ – and for me the most important hints that the game can be success are two. Mapbox list them on their showcase – https://www.mapbox.com/showcase and that two of the designers worked in the five in Five Studios Interactive which have invented the drone game with awesome and easy 3D landscape editor – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10zkjYjSWZo.
Based on the statistics there is ~100K going to the developers pocket every day, all the people who spend this money believe that the game will be around for long enough time to withdraw even more. It’s a risky investment, so everyone must consider buying the virtual land in Earth2 on their own.

I invested a few hundred dollars buying a few tiles and I listed them in the market place hoping to sell.. so far, no good! My tiles(land) have been sitting there for weeks and at a discount to top it off. I wouldn’t suggest anyone invest in Earth 2

Day by day, i start to realise that this Earth2.io is nothing more than a fishy business. These so called “proffesionals” had 3 months to prepare for the so much shouted “DUBAI / UAE” release, but yet they failed big time. Seriously folks, their lead engineer does not have proactive thinking? It was very obvious that players will storm at the moment of the launch, they had 3 months to setup proper servers and backups in order to make sure that everything goes smooth.

When the big launch came, surprise: servers down! And of course, they play the innocent card. If you’re thinking outside the box, this “servers down” thing was nothing more than a huge benefit for them. Why? I’ll explain my personal experience. I had preselected a tiny lot of 16 tiles, somewhere over UAE location https://prnt.sc/10s69eb and i clicked “buy” at second 1 after countdown. At second 2, servers were down.

After several refresh, i still could not purchase the desired lot, as you can clearly see here: https://www.loom.com/share/a2a175167d8048e491ec3efed877d3ca?fbclid=IwAR36Co4SFgLSkKOl0m7f2HxG-r-e_mQPm70wjr83WvfTBAqkAe4hpJ1mtFo

Done another refresh. Then, surprise: servers down again! To my surprise, when they were back on, the entire area where i planned to purchase, was already bought, in big lots of 300+ tiles! Seriously, how can someone (a real human) to buy 300+ lots in 2-3 seconds after the servers were back on? This is way too fishy , in order to be able to swallow the lies that Shane & co are serving to us.

Obviously, there were bots involved, like this: https://prnt.sc/10s6dfg and many many others. But the fun part comes now: i’m 99% sure that those bots were deliberately allowed at the moment of DUBAI / UAE. You may wonder why? It’s all about MONEY! A man’s ability to perform several actions within seconds it’s close to 0. By several actions, i’m reffering that, after the servers went back on, the play had to search for the area on the map, select the tiles, click buy, etc. These actions obviously can’t be done within few seconds (under 10).

So, by allowing ONLY honest players to buy land, they would not get the price per tile hype up enough to skyrocket their profits…

The solutions (own bots, distributed to certain key people of their own), which to be present to buy land at miliseconds, so that this ensures a very rapid increase of price per tile, so that the remaining “fools” have no other choice but to by much expensive.

Of course, they’ll play the innocent card, as always. This is convenient for them, as their hands are not dirty (directly). They were aware 3 months before UAE, about the fact that people reported them several “bots involved” situations, and yet, they have done NONE about this. Why would they play the “book of fairness” ? There’s no point to sabotage huge profits, after all, ya? So they let the bots go wild, then play the “oh, we’re sorry, we did not expected that, it’s a shame, but we can’t do anything to correct the situation”.

While their accounts filled up with lots of $$$ from the “fools” who put their snouts on this fishy thing called E2.

I’m not complaining about the situation, but the whole thing it’s nothing more than a disrespectful mockery agains the honest players.

Fortunately, my wife’s games world related vlog gained ground over the last year, so i’ll make sure that her’s over 600.000+ followers will find out in the next material about this mockery which E2 became.