Blockchain gaming is only four years old — a toddler compared to the rest of the industry. It has a lot of growing up to do, particularly when it comes to play-to-earn games.
I’m a 28-year game industry veteran. I’ve produced 32 titles in that period of time on everything from Sega Genesis to Oculus Rift. Some of them were great. Many were forgettable. I didn’t hear much chatter about blockchain gaming from traditional developers and players until Axie Infinity began to take off. Cut to the peak of 2021, and the game had nearly 2 million players logging on daily.
Most people outside the crypto community at the time were (and still are) extremely skeptical about blockchain’s ability to add anything meaningful to games. They see Axie as an example of the low production values and rampant speculation they want to avoid at all costs. Moreso, they see blockchain as a continuation of overreach by publishers. However, in 2021, many believed Axie would prove blockchain gaming skeptics wrong.
It didn’t. Axie and most other crypto “games” to date have been awful experiences. They aren’t even really games. They’re more like digital sharecropping, rich NFT owners exploiting low-wage earning players. It’s shallow gameplay layered on a tokenomics model. This was highlighted most recently in October, when Axie’s SLP token plummeted in value as a result of an impending token unlock.
Related: Crypto gaming needs to be fun to be successful — Money doesn’t matter
Most players sell their tokens on the crypto market rather than in the game, meaning token numbers increase and cause a sort of crypto inflation. The game model relies on a constant inflow of new players to sustain it — something this month has shown to be very much not guaranteed.
Axie’s value is primarily driven by this speculation rather than fun. The game, if it can even be called that, is literally a grind. Despite attempts to separate it from game economy reliance with iterations like Axie Origins, the toxic model of being hyper-dependent on tokenomics prevails. This continues to detract from projects that are trying to make fun games that utilize blockchain to enhance player experience.
At the peak of its popularity, the team behind Axie arrogantly claimed that they were “freeing” players and enabling a world in which work and play merge. But the game’s decline following the massive $620 million hack on customer funds in March showed how hollow this language was. Axie creator Sky Mavis…
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