"Earn from activity on your land" is the landowner promise in @Pixels. The earn is real. But the activity is usually someone else's. 🤔
The land tax mechanic works like this: when a farmhand works your NFT plot, harvesting crops, gathering resources, running your industries, the landowner takes a percentage of the output automatically. No additional work required from the owner. The land does the economic lifting. The farmhand does the physical lifting.
This is passive income by design. It's stated that way, framed that way, and priced into secondary market valuations for NFT land. And it works exactly as described. Landowners in Pixels can log in less frequently than farmhands and still accumulate resources because other players are producing them on their behalf.
What the framing skips is what makes the passivity possible. The landowner isn't earning despite doing nothing. The landowner is earning because someone else is actively doing something. Those are different sentences. Only one of them appears in the marketing.
I'm not making a moral argument here. Passive income structures exist in the real world for defensible reasons and with substantial economic critique. What I'm pointing out is that @Pixels built virtual landlord economics into a Web3 farming game, named them "activity on your land," and the community has largely not interrogated what that phrase actually describes.
The earn from activity model is technically honest. The framing of who provides the activity is left unstated. In a game that positions itself as a new kind of digital economy, that gap is worth naming explicitly.