GameFi is a type of blockchain game where players are offered the opportunity to earn tokens or cryptocurrency directly during gameplay. The mechanics are called play-to-earn (P2E). In 2021–2022, it seemed that P2E was about to turn the entire industry upside down, but in reality, everything turned out to be much more complicated. Let’s take a look at what went wrong, using specific examples from projects in which I myself participated and can give my forum opinion.
Plant vs Undead
PVU was a real sensation at the start: guys from Asia and Latin America flocked to it, and the game’s economy was even discussed on regular gaming forums. The idea was that you grow plants, earn tokens, and can exchange them for real money. But the model turned out to be very dependent on the influx of new players: as soon as the hype died down and the number of newbies decreased, payments decreased, the token collapsed, and activity practically disappeared. Now the project formally exists, but the community is minimal, updates are rare, and the economy no longer works.
Sunflower Farmers
This thing is probably the most honest P2E of the whole wave: open source code, no exaggerated promises, just a simple farming simulator on the blockchain. But even here, there were problems. The game crashed several times for a few days due to an influx of bots, and the team was forced to restart the economy and change the rules. Some players grew tired of the constant changes (including me), and the token also fell sharply.
Why did GameFi projects decline so quickly?
The main problem with almost all of the first wave of projects was an economy built exclusively on a constant influx of new players and speculation around NFTs. As soon as the hype died down and the influx of new users slowed, the system stopped working: tokens depreciated, payments stopped, and the team lost interest in further development. It was a pure pyramid scheme, no matter what they promised at the start.
Conclusion
In recent years, the P2E gaming market has gone from mass hype to a local bear market. Most high-profile GameFi projects were extremely vulnerable to declining interest and the outflow of new players — which is why today, virtually all “former hits” have either stopped or turned into niche experiments. Against this backdrop, it is particularly interesting to observe those who continue to work for the long term and are not afraid to bet on real game mechanics, rather than just a financial pyramid.
