The crypto gaming space has done an amazing job at feeling like something is juuust about to happen. Soon. Definitely. But then it never manages to really have its moment. The whole space has kind of limped through the past six or seven years, promising to revolutionize an industry, only to discover nobody really wants what they’re offering. On paper, the vision makes sense: games where players truly owned their digital assets, where time spent playing translates into real earnings and where virtual economies can thrive. But in reality, it’s a wasteland of abandoned projects, uninterested gamers, and the slow realization that the people who play games, the actual gamers who power that $200 billion industry, never asked for their leisure time to be monetized. And if they did, that very small minority could go pro, or become a streamer, or move into whatever other avenue they wanted in that already very well established ecosystem.
This isn’t to say that blockchain games haven’t ‘succeeded’ in the sense that they have got a bunch of players and some projects have earned a lot of money. But blockchain and crypto gaming has been actively shunned by the traditional gaming community, or rather the gaming community, since day dot. In fact since 2018, an astonishing 75% of blockchain games have been discontinued. That’s not just a few failed experiments, that’s a full on rejection of the crypto model, by both players and developers. The carcasses of these projects litter the landscape with forgotten tokens, dead Discord servers, and whitepapers full of revolutionary promises sitting dormant on people’s hardrives. The problem wasn’t just that these games were bad (though most of them absolutely were), but that they fundamentally misunderstood why people play games in the first place! Gamers don’t log in to engage with decentralized finance protocols, or even to earn money! They play to escape, to compete, to be part of a story, or to simply zone out after a long day. The idea that they’d trade that for the ‘privilege’ of becoming unpaid liquidity providers was always absurd.
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When Ubisoft unveiled its Quartz platform, allowing players to buy NFT cosmetic items for games like Ghost Recon, the announcement trailer was ratioed into oblivion, with 96% of viewers hitting the dislike button. Electronic Arts briefly floated the idea of NFTs before quietly shelving the concept. Rumors that GTA VI might incorporate blockchain elements sparked such outrage that Rockstar had to clarify they had no such plans. Even Axie Infinity, the poster child of play-to-earn, started to crumble under the weight of its own economic contradictions, leaving players in developing countries stranded with worthless tokens after they’d been sold the dream of a viable income source. The message from the gaming community has been very clear: gamers don’t hate innovation, but they do hate being treated like revenue streams. And that’s true in all aspects of gaming. It’s why EA has faced strong backlash in the past and why the Call of Duty franchise has been struggling with their fanbase-turned-user base-turned-hateful-mob.
Also, a lot of what crypto-game devs were promising wasn’t new at all, it just got a web3 rebranding under the name ‘NFT’. Buying skins and trading within game ecosystems is already very well established - WoW, Counter Strike, EVE Online, even Runescape just to name a few. The economies that developers have been trying to man handle onto a blockchain, are thriving on a traditional finance model. If you want to buy something, you get your credit card and you buy it. The online marketplaces, the auction houses, the payment rails - they already exist for the players that want them. Everyone else just wants to play a game.
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There are some exceptions, games that have managed to incorporate blockchain elements without making them the entire point. Gods Unchained, a digital card game, allows players to trade NFT-based cards but doesn’t force the technology down their throats. Dark Forest, an on-chain strategy game, has cultivated a very niche but devoted following by focusing on clever mechanics rather than token speculation. These outliers succeed where others failed because they start with a simple premise: make a good game first, then figure out if blockchain adds anything of value. The most successful games in history, the ones that have generated billions and shaped cultures, were never beloved because of their monetization strategies.
They were beloved because they were fun!
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And the lesson here isn’t just for the crypto gaming devs, or traditional gaming devs, it actually applies to all of gaming and all of blockchain technology: nobody cares about your blockchain, if it doesn’t make something better. Gamers care about whether your game is fun and therefore worth playing - that is the inherent value of a game: entertainment. Investors care about whether your blockchain does something. Until developers internalize that, and they stop treating players as walking wallets, the crypto gaming industry will continue to go together like lemon juice and milk.
And look, the crypto gaming scene isn’t necessarily dead, but devs would need to put forward a very compelling case for putting a game on blockchain in order to have it succeed. And if ‘you can earn money while you play’, doesn’t cut it, it’ll be interesting to see what does.