The promise of “play-to-earn” gaming captured the imagination of millions of people during the 2021 bull market. Games like Axie Infinity were creating real income streams for players in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Indonesia — enough for some people to quit their day jobs. Then the market turned, token prices crashed, and a lot of those income streams dried up.
So where does blockchain gaming stand now? Is play-to-earn dead, or has it just evolved? And if you want to actually participate — and potentially earn — what does a realistic approach look like?
Understanding How Blockchain Games Actually Work
Before you put any money into a blockchain game, you need to understand the basic economics. Most blockchain games have two or three token systems: a governance or utility token (often the main “currency” of the game), NFT-based assets (characters, items, land), and sometimes a secondary in-game currency for regular transactions.
The value of these tokens is driven by player demand — how much players are willing to pay for in-game assets or how much the governance token is worth based on the game’s economic activity. This creates a circular dynamic: when the game grows and new players enter, demand for NFT assets goes up, prices rise, early players profit, and this attracts more players. When growth stalls or players exit, the reverse happens — prices fall, existing players try to sell, which drives prices lower, which causes more exits.
This is why “play-to-earn” is really “play-to-speculate” in most cases. If you understand that and treat it accordingly, you can participate sensibly. If you think blockchain gaming is a sustainable income source independent of speculation, you’re likely to be disappointed.
The Games Worth Paying Attention To
The blockchain gaming landscape has changed significantly since 2021. The pure play-to-earn model has largely failed — too many games were essentially Ponzi structures where new player investment paid existing player earnings. The games that are surviving and growing are those that figured out how to be actually fun first, with earnings as a secondary benefit.
Axie Infinity — the poster child of play-to-earn — has completely rebuilt its economy with a more sustainable model. The original Axie model collapsed because it required constant new player inflows to sustain existing player earnings. The rebuilt version focuses more on genuine gameplay, with earnings tied to competitive performance rather than just participation. It’s a harder game to earn from now, but it’s more sustainable.
Gods Unchained is a trading card game built on Immutable X (an Ethereum Layer 2) that takes a different approach: it’s a genuinely well-designed competitive card game that happens to have blockchain-backed card ownership. You earn cards by winning matches, and those cards have real market value because the game has real players who want them. This is closer to the ideal model.
Illuvium is a high-production-value RPG/strategy game that has been building toward a complete game ecosystem with multiple titles. The production values are significantly higher than most blockchain games, and the team has focused on making a game that non-crypto players would actually want to play. Whether it succeeds remains to be seen, but the approach is more fundamentally sound than “here’s an NFT, now farm tokens.”
Pixels is a pixel-art farming game in the Axie Infinity ecosystem that gained significant traction in 2024, demonstrating that casual blockchain games with engaging loops can attract large player bases even outside bull market conditions.
How to Get Started Without Losing Your Shirt
Here’s a practical framework for approaching blockchain gaming with an investor’s mindset rather than a gambler’s mindset:
Step 1: Start with free-to-play options. Several quality blockchain games have free-to-play entry points. Gods Unchained, for example, gives you starter cards just for signing up. You can start learning the game, the community, and the economy without spending anything. This is valuable due diligence.
Step 2: Understand the game’s economy before buying any assets. Look at floor prices for entry-level NFTs and calculate how long it would take to “earn back” your investment at current earning rates. If the earning rates are denominated in a token whose value has been declining for 6 months, be skeptical. Always calculate in dollar terms, not token terms.
Step 3: Set a fixed, loss-tolerant budget. Only invest what you would be willing to lose entirely. The risk isn’t just that the game becomes less popular — it’s also that the studio gets hacked, the smart contracts have bugs, or the market simply collapses. These are all real risks that have materialized in real games. Treat any money you put in as entertainment spending, not investment.
Step 4: Understand where you fit in the ecosystem. In every blockchain game, there are different player types: scholars (people using delegated NFTs to play), retail players (individual owners of starter-level NFTs), guild operators (organizations that manage delegated NFTs), and speculators (people primarily interested in asset appreciation). Your expected returns and risk profile are very different depending on which role you occupy.
The Scholarship Model: Lower Risk, Lower Reward
One approach that gained popularity with Axie Infinity is the “scholarship” model. In this setup, a guild or NFT owner (the “manager”) lends their NFT assets to a player (the “scholar”) who can’t afford to buy in. The earnings are split between manager and scholar, typically 70/30 or 60/40 in favor of the manager.
For scholars, this removes the upfront capital risk. You can learn the game, earn some income, and potentially save up to buy your own assets. For managers, it’s a way to generate yield on NFT holdings that would otherwise sit idle.
The scholarship model has real risks too — particularly scams (fake scholarship opportunities designed to steal your in-game earnings or credentials), guilds that pay poorly or change terms, and the risk that the game’s economy deteriorates. But as entry points into blockchain gaming, well-run scholarship programs through established guilds are genuinely lower risk than buying your own NFTs cold.
The Future of Blockchain Gaming
The sustainable future of blockchain gaming isn’t “play games and earn a living.” That’s probably not coming back as a widespread phenomenon. What is realistic: games that use NFTs to give players genuine ownership of their in-game assets, create real secondary markets for those assets, and reward skilled and engaged players with items of real market value.
The key shift is from “earning” as the primary appeal to “ownership” as the primary innovation. Players who invest time and skill into building valuable in-game characters, items, or land should be able to sell those assets in open markets. That’s a genuinely novel improvement over traditional gaming where everything you earn disappears when the game shuts down.
The games that figure out how to be genuinely fun, build loyal communities, and then layer real ownership on top of that — rather than using earning mechanics as a Trojan horse to bootstrap player numbers — are the ones that will define blockchain gaming over the next decade.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Blockchain gaming involves significant financial risk. Never invest more than you can afford to lose, and always conduct your own research before participating in any game economy.
