I am wrapping my head around what appears to be an exotic perspective for me regarding Steem. While being rewarded for producing content as a mechanism preferable to producing content without reward is easy to grasp, and is a seemingly important advance in society, I am struggling with viewing playing a game as being an investor in the game.
I do see that paying into game mechanics delivers financial power to the game development company, but fail to grasp that this is comparable to investing, despite the specific mechanics of the game itself - which I note was repeatedly and demonstrably stated by the devs to be certain to undergo revision.
'Investor' is a term for a person that is providing necessary funds to an entity in exchange for returns that the investment vehicle seeks for the purpose of creating increased value of the investment vehicle, and has traditionally been conducted through specific mechanisms, such as stocks, bonds, and lending.
Steem has altered landscape by enabling returns to be generated with non-traditional vehicles, but I do not grasp how your expectations of return are reasonable in this specific vehicle, particularly as - again, despite the initial mechanism of the game - this is clearly a game, and your provision of funds was not through purchasing equity in the company developing the game (if there even is one), but simply through playing the game.
Methinks you have assumed too much from being able to generate profitable returns via Steem transforming non-traditional mechanisms so that they potentiate returns. Critically, investment vehicles provide a prospectus, and investors do due diligence, neither of which appear to have been undertaken here.
I am confident that you are able to gain from this situation, by being better informed as to the difference between an investment and profiteering. Profiteering can produce returns - but such returns aren't really investment returns, and such vehicles potentiating profiteering aren't investment grade opportunities.
I appreciate your position better now from your post, and gain insight from it, so thank you. I hope you also gain insight from how Steem is transforming investment, and how such transformative events inevitably are fraught with risk. When paradigms change, legacy risk assessment no longer pertains, and you (I have not investigated your history at all) appear to have been able to parlay a good grasp of the novel potential of Steem rewards into good returns heretofore. Of course, even in traditional investment vehicles risk is present, and even after due diligence investors fail to attain returns, and even lose stake, at times.
Given the paradigmatic novelty here, you would be remiss to fail to take such risks in stride in your pecuniary pursuits.
If you'd invested in a vehicle intended for the purpose, provisioned with a prospectus and having conducted due diligence which was now proving to have been tainted with mendacity, I would agree that you had 'been skinned'.
But assuming playing a game was an investment grade vehicle and undertaking the risk of that assumption, it is pretty ludicrous to accuse the devs of defrauding you. I understand your disappointment. However, the responsibility for the failure to generate a return from outlays is your own, for misapprehending playing a game as a worthy investment vehicle. Just as a bit of reference, ever since Everquest, games have been actively discouraging players from generating profit from their games. No promises of profitable returns were made, and the devs made very clear that the game was being actively developed, and that therefore extant mechanisms were transitory. Your assumptions to the contrary should be enlightening to you, and your outrage might be better directed at the person that made insuperable assumptions than at devs making a game playable, and not seeking to solicit investments.
With appropriate consideration, I expect you can find this experience to be pure profit, particularly going forward in an evolving landscape.
Thank you.