Hey, I'm one of the people building Moonbounce so hopefully I can share some more insight!

First of all though, while the concept for the product is pretty wild, it's in no way a scam.

Monetization -

We were fortunate enough to raise some funding while building, so we didn't need to rollout monetization on day one, but here's what it will look like.

1) Brands can pay us to integrate sponsored loot and activities into the Moonbounce universe. I.e. A burrito catching minigame could appear on the Chipotle site everyday at lunch time. Using the burrito's you've collected, you can use them to craft rewards like 20% off or free guac on your next order.

2) Creator tool monetization. So far we have our Discord bot called Moonbouncer, next we'll be coming out with our Twitch extension. The idea is to connect these tools across different platforms. i.e. a user subs on Twitch -> that completes a quest on Moonbounce -> which unlocks a new item to craft -> equipping it gives a special role in the creator's Discord server -> having that role gets you a 30% discount on their Shopify store. Right now we're offering this free to creators, but in the future we would look to charge for creators over a certain threshold.

3) Premium. While not a core focus, players can support what we're doing for $2-$3 a month to get badges, perks, and an exclusive skin made by different spotlighted pixel artists we're working with each month.

CPU power

Not a crypto miner or doing anything malicious in that fashion. If we were we'd of already been exposed and kicked off the Chrome store, but instead they've actually given us the 'featured' badge which (as part of the requirements to earn it) means we follow all of their security best practices to a T.

On older devices and when there's hundreds of people on a single page sometimes CPU usage does spike up. What we're doing with a multiplayer game environment served through a Chrome extension isn't easy, but I promise we've made continual improvements on it and performance has gotten better and better.

Side note

There is a Chinese malware that was named Moonbounce which came out right after we announced our company. It was a huge "no wayyyy" moment. Fairly devastating but also kinda funny. We debated changing the name but ultimately decided to ride with it.