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>But are there any games where you can plausibly put real money in and generate excess gains in virtual assets in a short time?

CS:GO

Last I checked, you cannot withdraw money from a steam account like you can a checking account. Has this changed?

Not from steam directly, but there are a number of websites to sell your CSGO skins for real money on.

Not in the scale for a first world country. You talk about 2nd/3rd world countries and you can argue that account selling is the modern gold rush.

I don't know that this has actually been done for these kind of games, but selling an account in it's entirety would be one way of making an asset somewhat transferable.

> ...but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming.

I don't know what to call it, but there were examples like Anshe Chung; those might re-emerge with the upcoming vr-scape/metaverse/whatever-itll-be-called.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung

Second Life is hardly a typical video game, though. It's barely a game at all.