MY nephew showed me something last week that took me a full minute to understand, and I’m supposed to be the one who explains technology to people over coffee on Saturdays.
He’d opened a browser tab – no download, no install – and within seconds was sliding across a neon arena, gunning down strangers in a first-person shooter that felt like a lean cousin of Halo.
That part I understood; kids have done this since LAN cafes lined Kuching’s streets. What stopped me was the second tab beside it: a crypto wallet.
Every kill he landed, if he had the right skin equipped, was quietly earning him a currency called “e” – convertible into real Solana, real money, sitting in his account by the time he logged off.
The game is ev.io. And what struck me wasn’t the shooting. It was how casually my nephew treated the fact that play and paycheck had become the same motion.
Work wearing a costume
We’ve always had a small, lucky group of people who get paid to do something they love – musicians, athletes, the odd hobbyist who turned a passion into a business. ev.io tries to make that luck available to everyone.
Buy a character skin – anywhere from a few ringgit to the price of a used motorbike – and suddenly the game you’d have played for fun anyway starts paying you like a job.
I used to work somewhere that was very good at keeping people hooked, and I’ve written before about what that cost me personally. So, my first thought wasn’t “wow, clever”.
It was “I’ve seen this before.” It’s the same trick as an app that pings you with surge pricing at midnight to get you back on the road – just dressed up as a game instead of a job.
A kill streak, a currency ticker going up while you play: it’s designed to make you want to keep going, the same way any job with a bonus scheme is.
Who’s actually holding the risk
Most play-to-earn crypto games collapse because their economics are a shell game – new players buy in, their money pays out the early players, which is a polite way of describing a Ponzi scheme with a joystick.
Ev.io’s defenders point out, fairly, that its rewards are funded by sponsors rather than newer players’ NFT purchases propping up older ones. That’s a real distinction – the game doesn’t strictly need to keep growing to keep paying.
But the risk still sits with my nephew, and with anyone else who spent real money on a skin priced in a volatile cryptocurrency, hoping to earn it back one kill at a time.
The sponsors take a marketing write-off either way. The house, as always, finds a way not to lose.
The Sarawak angle nobody’s talking about yet
I don’t think this stays a niche crypto-gaming story for long. A browser game with zero download friction, playable on the low-spec laptops half of Sarawak’s students own, that dangles real income for good reflexes, is exactly the kind of thing that spreads through a school WhatsApp group faster than any teacher can explain the risks.
We’ve spent years rightly worrying about gambling apps disguised as games for young people. This is a shooter that isn’t fundamentally different – better production values, calling itself Web3.
I’m not writing this to scold anyone who plays; the gameplay, by every account, is genuinely good. I’m writing it because “play-to-earn” sounds like a gift – your hobby now pays you.
What it more often is: a very old idea, turn leisure into labour and let the worker absorb the risk, delivered through a faster, more fun front door than the gig economy ever managed.
What a Sarawakian version could actually look like
Here’s where I stop critiquing and start dreaming, because ev.io’s real flaw isn’t the crypto – it’s the imagination.
A neon arena and a nameless soldier skin is the laziest possible costume for a shooter. We have better material in our own history.
Picture a browser game built around the siege of Bukit Sadok – the Iban war leader Rentap’s ironwood fortress in Betong, which withstood three separate expeditions by Charles Brooke between 1857 and 1861 before it fell.
Resist flattening this into “Dayak versus British”. Sarawak wasn’t yet a British colony – it was the independent Brooke Raj – and Brooke’s 1857 force was itself 3,500 Dayaks and 500 Malays, allies drawn from longhouses Rentap had alienated.
The real conflict is sharper than any colonial binary: alliance against alliance, with the Rajah’s household as one more player in an older regional contest.
The weapons tell the same complicated story. Rentap’s fort wasn’t defended with sumpit alone – his men had captured muskets and small cannons of their own, one nicknamed Bujang Timpang Berang.
What finally broke the siege in 1861 wasn’t rifle fire; it was Bujang Sadok, a twelve-pounder brass cannon built in Kuching and hauled up the mountain, going gun-for-gun against Rentap’s own artillery.
That’s a far better game mechanic than “traditional weapon versus colonial gun”: two sides adapting captured technology against each other, four years of failed assaults before one finally worked.
Now put a play-to-earn layer over that – carefully. Not crypto skins speculated on by teenagers with no income, but something closer to what ev.io’s sponsor model gestures at without reaching: rewards funded by heritage grants or tourism boards, paid out in something that circulates locally.
Designs licensed from real Iban artists and historians, with royalties every time someone equips one – a pipeline back to the culture-bearers whose story it’s telling.
Get that ownership question wrong, and you’ve built a more elegant version of the extraction the trading houses once practised on this land.
That’s the question worth sitting with. A game like this could be Sarawakians reclaiming Bukit Sadok on their own terms – or one more outsider’s product wearing Dayak history as a skin. Ev.io proved the mechanics are easy to copy.
Whether a Sarawakian version honours Rentap’s four-year fight or simply monetises it depends on who’s in the design room, and who gets paid when Bujang Sadok fires.
This week’s practice
If someone in your household is playing something that pays out real money for real performance, sit with them for one match. Not to police it.
Just to ask, out loud, together: who set the rules of this economy, and who’s actually holding the risk if it breaks?
That single question, asked early, is worth more than any warning delivered after the wallet’s already been connected.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
