These last few days I saw several posts about RollerCoin so I thought it would be a great idea to check the game out. As always, I'll first give you some details on the game itself and take a look at what it has to offer. We'll also check whether it might be a scam or not. In the end I'm going to answer that single yet most important question: Is it worth your time? Lets get right into it!
The Game
RollerCoin is your classical crypto mining simulator. When you first start the game you find your alter ego sitting in an empty apartment with nothing but your desk and an old computer on it. The game is all about increasing your hash rate in order to mine more cryptocurrency. While you only generate a virtual hash rate, the cryptocurrency you earn is real. As of now the game offers virtual mining of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin. There are two ways to increase your hash rate. You can play a selection of mini games or you can buy mining equipment. Every time you finish a mini game you are rewarded with some temporary mining power. At first you'll lose that power again after 24h. Play enough games and you get rewarded with better and better computers increasing the time it takes your temporary mining power to vanish. At the highest level you'll keep the power for a total of seven days.
If you don't play a game for 24 hours you'll lose all upgrades to your computer though and you'll be back to where you started. If you buy mining equipment you gain a permanent boost to your mining power. Mining gear can be bought with the games ingame currency (called Rollertoken) or with the Satoshis you mined. Miners start at a price of 4,696 Satoshi with the most expensive one being sold for 117,400 Satoshi.
To give you a feeling for the hash rate provided by these miners, the RollerMiner S4 provides you with 1160 GH/s. Completing a single mini game which will take 30 seconds at most will reward you with about 1000 GH/s. As you can see, you'd need to invest quite some money in order to really get your permanent mining power going.
The game uses very simple yet well done pixel art giving it a nice retro look. Retro is also the word best suited to describe the mini games. They are mostly 80s classics redone in blockchain style mixed with some newer titles like 2048 or Flappy Bird. Each game comes with a total of 10 difficulty levels and you have to beat a level three times in order to unlock the next one. Every day your progress is reset so you'll always start at level 1 again.
As you can see, the art style is very basic and while the games are fun to play at the beginning they get old very fast. At the first level they are way too easy so getting up to the more challenging levels every day is quickly feeling like a chore.
So is it a scam?
To be honest this was the first question that came to my mind when I first read about the game. There are a lot of these kind of games. Start small, invest money, earn big. That's what a lot of mining simulators do. In The Anatomy of Scam I discussed what to look for if you suspect an offer might be a Scam. I'm not going to check every topic from the list because there's one very important factor that puts RollerCoin firmly in the no-scam category: Their payout is strictly limited. Scam sites like coin-farm will promise you unlimited earnings, sometimes even gloating about the exponential increase to your earnings you could achieve if you only invested some more money.
In RollerCoin a virtual block is mined every 5 minutes and distributed to all players with a positive hash rate. The size of this block is capped at 4,500 Satoshi. No matter how much mining power you have, you're always only getting a share of those 4,500 Satoshis. Because of this mechanic they have complete control over how much they pay out to their users every day, making me believe that RollerCoin is to be considered legit.
But is it worth your time?
I have to admit I'm a little on the edge here. I like the games art style and I think it does have some flair. Sadly though my answer has to be: No, it's not. That's for several reasons adding up. First of all, from an earning perspective you shouldn't expect to really earn anything from playing the game. I tested it intensively for several days and earned a total of 180 Satoshi. Getting anywhere near even the smallest miner they sell would take weeks so building up anything without investing your own BTC would take forever. That wouldn't be a problem if the game itself was fun. Never play a game you don't enjoy simply because you are paid some Satoshi to do so! The issue at hand simply is: It's not a very fun game, at least not for a prolonged time.
At first the games are easy but somewhat fun. You'll also get a sense of progression with your hast rate steadily going up. This is changing quite fast though. The games would get old soon even at the highest difficulties. Having to suffer through level 1 of each game you want to play every day though is really killing the flow. There's just no point to playing the early stages once you've played for a while. Another problem is the temporary nature of the hash rate you accumulate. At first this is only going up. After some days though you'll start losing power because some of it expired. This means that you'll have to play even more if you want to gain any more power. Considering that you'll usually play the most when you first find a new game your net hash rate can only go down at that point.
Another issue with the game is the amount of time it wastes. Every time you finish a game you'll get the screen above. "Validating" your game will take approximately 15 seconds. If you click on another tab the process will stop so you'll have to actually suffer through this useless animation every time you want to play another game. To add insult to injury whenever you played a game it's going on cooldown for 60 seconds. Enjoying one game and want to play it again? You either have to wait a minute or play another game in between. I'm note quite sure why they decided to code it the way they did, it might be a bot protection, but no matter what, it's highly annoying to me.
If you add up all those points you end up with a game that's fun and interesting for a few days but then gets old really fast. The minimal withdrawal is 10,000 Satoshi and when you realize that you don't really enjoy the game anymore this amount will still be far away. Wrapping it all up I can't recommend the game and I won't play it any more but there's nothing wrong with playing it either. If you enjoy some 80s arcade game every now and then and grow fond of the pixel art you might enjoy it for a longer time than I did. So in case you want to join you can check it out at https://rollercoin.com/.
Thank you all for reading and let me know what you think of the game in the comments! See you all next time.
