I Made Hundreds of Dollars Playing Mobile Games. It Wasn’t Worth It.

Fast, easy money is usually too good to be true

In December, I stumbled upon the proposition that I could make money playing mobile games, a scenario I would have dreamed about as a kid. I found a website called InboxDollars that gave offers that if I reached certain levels of mobile games, I could earn hundreds of dollars.

It seemed like money that could be easy to make, money I could make while I was doing something I enjoyed otherwise. There were tons of hours I spent playing mobile games in a past life where I made zero money.

Video games may have the benefits of improved working memory, critical thinking, and hand-eye coordination. But for me? Video games and particularly mobile games have largely been a huge waste of time. In my various quests to advance myself and move forward instead of sliding backward or stagnant, there is no place or piece of the puzzle where video games fall into the equation. They’re a lot of fun, but too fun — an escape from the real world when I’m unsatisfied with my own.

The proposition of making money playing video games was always alluring and seemingly unreachable to me, much like the idea of making money writing first was. For most of my life, I saw video games as an escape and something I love, and I struggled with addiction to certain games, particularly massively multiplayer online role-playing games. I attribute some of my lack of academic and social progress in certain years of my life to getting sucked into these games — but it was completely my fault at ages eight to 12 for having no self-control over anything else.

So to make money playing mobile games? Yeah, that seemed really cool.

There were conditions, however. I had to reach the maximum level within 30 days of playing the game. I knew it sounded a bit too good to be true, and the levels may have been impossible to hit. But I wanted to experiment to see if it was a good proposition anyway.

And so I downloaded the game and excitedly started to play these mobile games. I found two games that required varying levels of activity. There was one that was a puzzle role playing game that required me to match tiles with their corresponding colors like it was Candy Crush. And there was Monopoly GO!, a game where I could largely put on an auto setting and let the game do the work itself, while I tinkered with improvements and randomly pressed buttons around my screen. I could play Monopoly GO! while on walks, runs, or doing a plethora of other household activities.

Let me just say that this was a very bad idea for me to commit to — having a full-time job working as an educator in the school system, being in law school, and trying to run personal bests as a runner on the side makes my schedule very packed. But I wanted to test the waters regardless to see if playing mobile games for money could be a legitimate side hustle and income stream.

In the beginning, it was easy. I played the games furiously and often. I was on my winter break from work and law school and decided this was a good way to pass the time and have fun while doing so. I ascended levels very quickly and did not have to put any real money in in-game transactions. My goal was to spend no real money whatsoever on this quest.

For a while, it was going very well and seemed like it would be a sure thing.

Eventually, however, the honeymoon phase ended. I found that levels rapidly became a lot more difficult to ascend. The same amount of time it took to get from levels 1 to 15, for example, was how much time it took to get from level 15 to 16. I also found that I would need to make a variety of in-game transactions to hit the targets on time.

One of the games, Monopoly, had some rewards in place if you could invite friends to start playing the game too, so I did. I started to text friends non-stop with annoying, solicitous links to play the game. A few did play it solely out of interest. I started to tell them I got free in-game rewards and points on my quest to make money playing mobile games, and this got significantly more of my friends to start playing the games, then delete them once they were no longer interested (yes, I have pretty good friends).

But I would say I would spend at least an hour a day trying to keep up with my targets. I would do this particularly during unstructured times or times when I was doing other mindless tasks.

This was a major time suck that wasn’t worth it. There could have been plenty of better uses of my time, effort, and energy during these periods of time.

I eventually got the maximum rewards for both games, but that required some significant scrambling. For Monopoly GO!, I paid around $90 in in-game purchases to get to the maximum level on the very last day. I was paid $218, so the net pay was only $128. The logical part of my brain started to recognize this was not worth it. I started to recognize that if I had to put in what probably accumulated to 25 hours to earn $90, this meant the return on investment was a little over $3 an hour. But the emotional part of my brain fell into the sunk cost fallacy, thinking I was way too far in and committed to stop on the 29th or 30th day.

In the other puzzle RPG game, I paid about $60 in in-game transactions. But the InboxDollars rewards system incentivized these transactions and gave cash back if you made these purchases in the game. Plus, they helped me level up in the game faster and get the reward faster. I got my money back right away through these transactions, and I made $239 in the game. But since this game was a lot more intensive than randomly button-mashing and having the game on auto, my return on investment must have been even less than $3 an hour. Closer to the 28th day, I did get nervous that I wouldn’t hit the goal and made a few more microtransactions in the game.

In total, I made approximately $309 playing mobile games in a month.

I also won’t sit here and say it wasn’t fun, because it was. I very much enjoyed the rest and respite just spending 10 minutes on the phone playing games could give during a break, but there was an element that wasn’t fun. I was putting a ton of pressure on myself to hit certain checkpoints on certain days. I had to plan out how I was going to reach level 101 by day 30, for example, and I had to go into a much more intense mode of catch-up and urgency when it looked like I wasn’t going to hit the goal in time. The financial incentive and pressure actually made the games a lot less fun than they would have been otherwise.

I still play Monopoly GO! for fun, but not the same amount or ferocity as I did when I was trying to make money playing the game. I deleted the puzzle role-playing game, however, as soon as I hit the goal and took enough screenshots to document my achievements and progress.

Ultimately, both games were a huge time commitment that I did not anticipate when I first started. I thought I could completely breeze through the games and make hundreds of dollars in a week. I found Reddit threads where people did this exact thing and played the games in a much more strategic way than I did — but this was not my story. I had to work tirelessly playing these games. I had to make in-game transactions like I was a seven-year-old who stole his parents’ credit card to spend money on Roblox. I told all my friends about making money playing games, but I was too embarrassed to tell my friends about all the microtransactions and how much I was playing to get there.

Somewhere along the line, too, the games stopped tracking between the gaming apps on my phone and between the InboxDollars mobile app. I looked at online threads and saw that this is a very common problem and that contacting the customer service of the website usually remedied the issue.

The first time I made an in-game transaction that was supposed to be reimbursed, InboxDollars reimbursed me right away. But it was clear I would have to contact customer service every single time I wanted to cash out another in-game achievement they would reimburse me on.

As someone who is in law school and works in a very legalistic profession in special education, I know the importance of documentation. I took screenshots of levels I hit, as well as the time and date I downloaded the app, so InboxDollars knew I finished my obligations within 30 days. I would screenshot my username with the level so it was clear the screenshot was legit and it was me. Every time I made an in game transaction that I was told would be reimbursed, I screenshotted the transaction as well as what day and time I made the purchase on the Apple App Store.

After the first time I was credited, it ended up being a huge headache to get my achievements credited and get paid. I sent all the screenshots as well as a screenshot of what the site promised I would be paid if I hit all the transactions. I submitted both tickets to customer support and then waited a few days to hear back.

The customer service person told me that I would not get reimbursed. They told me that they could only credit me if the third-party merchants and applications were tracked with the InboxDollars application. Not only that, but my account started to get automated messages every time I replied to a message or sent in a new ticket because I was allegedly submitting too many customer service tickets and my account may have been flagged.

I’m normally a calm person, but I was very ticked off, sending annoyed emails inquiring about what additional documentation I would need to submit. After I didn’t receive responses for a week or more, I asked to speak to a manager and threatened to make a complaint to the Better Business Bureau about the site not honoring its commitments. I found the Better Business Bureau reviews and realized that my 1-star review may not mean much, as the average rating for the site is 1.14/5 stars.

Eventually, customer service did credit me for both games. They informed me that they would make an exception for me as a loyal user, but that they reserve the right to not credit when apps no longer track because the merchants stop reimbursing InboxDollars themselves.

I thanked the agent for their time after the lengthy back and forth and resolved to never play mobile games for money again, at least not with this same vendor and stipulations.

At the end of the day, two lessons were reinforced: there’s usually no such thing as fast, easy money, and if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. I’m not saying people don’t luck into easy money. They can make one lucky investment or simply be born into a lot of wealth and privilege. There are people who have jobs where they make a lot of money sitting around and doing nothing. Some people win the lottery.

But for the most part, anything with the allure of getting you rich quickly and making money easily usually takes a lot more hard work and time than it advertises. I knew all this when I got into playing mobile games for money, but was still, at the end of the day, drawn to the allure and rush of doing so.

I don’t want to say no one can make a lot of easy money playing mobile games, as some professional gamers make a lot of money. But these are the best of the best in skill and talent.

Personally, I felt like I ultimately lost in the cost-benefit analysis — I lost more in terms of time, energy, and effort than I gained in money or even recreation. I’m glad I tried and saw it through to the end. And now I know that, sometimes, the boring, stable income streams are the best ones.