"Providing value" is doing some serious heavy lifting in that sentence - MLM/Ponzi schemes can definitely argue they "provide value" and its telling that its your metric for not being a con.

In a traditional ponzi scheme many people get paid, until the last people are left holding the bag.

As a video game maker myself I'd say that video games generally provide value. If this particular video game provides as much value as its valued at is not for me to decide, but for the people who play it and invest in it.

What if the only value is speculation or rent seeking on people that are poor? It’s already the case that the pay to earn economy crashed deeply. You keep saying value but without saying what that value actually is. Until a Ponzi scheme crashes everyone in it thinks it’s providing value after all.

As a videogame maker myself I’d rather give my games away for free than setup the kind of economic trap Axie has.

Axie may have done it wrong, but the concept of in game currency has been shown to be wildly lucrative in the past. Let's take Valve as an example. You get a CS:GO knife you're sometimes able to sell that for a large chunk of money. Valve takes a gigantic cut of any of those transactions, and then the money can only be used to buy further products from them. Is that more ethical than what Axie is doing? Wouldn't it be neat if instead of "valve fun bucks" it were real world money that players could pay their rent with?

If someone does this correctly it could end up being a very good thing IMO.

Stuff being wildly lucrative isn’t necessarily a great benchmark. On paper at least Axie has been wildly lucrative. Being wildly lucrative for some people who can pay their rent doesn’t make it moral either. As my sibling comment notes there’s also no free lunch and the lucrative for some people part has negatives for the rest of the player base.

That said I have nothing against player made cosmetics being sold but there are much more obviously equitable ways of doing that.

And then the elephant in the room that cosmetics are not game affecting and there is utterly no reason to use a blockchain for any of this.

Co-opting an existing player base to inject capitalism in it has flooded the market with bots, trade scams, and constant annoying spam "hey do you still want those headphones? how about that group?"

The only people who benefit from the CS:GO knives are the ones who are extremely lucky or constantly performing economic activity at the expense of the community, its not good.

"As a tupperware party host myself, I'd say that tupperware generally provides value. If this particular piece of plastic provides as much value as it's valued isn't for me to decide, but the friends and family I invite to the party."

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?