Play-to-earn (P2E) had a moment, but that’s the problem. Its time has passed. The thrill was the payout, not the play, not the result, which looked less like a game and more like shift work with a user interface.
To be fair, the experiments weren’t worthless. They proved that wallets can be controllers, assets can be portable, and communities can co-own the worlds they love. But it shouldn’t—and can’t—be denied that subsidies bent every design choice toward leeching mechanics. Everything was extraction: recruit, inflate, cash out, and repeat.
With the audience shrinking with the faucet drip rate, reasons to keep playing fall. It should be considered a filter—one that forces teams to build games someone will play even if its native token goes to zero.
Gaming finance (GameFi) needs to purge traditional thinking and mechanics, learn from the past, and take three simple steps: grow the play element, shrink the earn, and give the genre a chance to thrive.
The Painful Truth
P2E primed GameFi to chase the yield of tokens instead of the true purpose of play: fun. The end results are economies that crumble under design choices that extract enjoyment at every turn. It’s a painful reality where incentives are paid more than the gameplay ever delivered.
As retention collapsed, new money flows slowed, tokens spiraled, and projects folded under the weight. The numbers don’t lie. Funding for blockchain gaming dipped 93% year-over-year in Q2 this year, while daily unique active wallets fell by double digits.
More than 300 Web3 games went inactive, exposing how shallow the engagement was when rewards no longer covered the grind. It was a painful and bitter pill to swallow, but it brought clarity.
Games that had nothing to offer beyond emissions are dead or dying, and now builders have been left with the rubble of P2E in which to rebuild from the ground up. It’s time to ship systems that actually entertain people.
Regulation cracks the door open further to amplify the reality check: a healthy step for the GameFi scene. As bright lines are drawn around the plague of money-first, fun-second game loops, the P2E games, simply functioning as extraction machines, get treated like gambling.
Consider India’s legislation banning money-based online games, slapping “earn-first” mechanics with scrutiny they can’t hide from whenever they blur into consumer harm or wagering. It doesn’t spell the end of onchain gaming; it’s just forcing the games to be created fit for purpose (rather than turning into gambling engines to be milked dry).
Teams building P2E games now must address the T. Rex in the room: no more building to bleed dry, no more hype. No more extracting from the fun of games in exchange for inflationary tokens and feigned “play.” The time for actual play is now. Get building.
Ownership Without Extraction
The correction is already outlined in the Q2 data. Funding is drying up, and the retention gimmicks aren’t fooling anyone. Games built on spreadsheets and emissions schedules were never built with genuine long-term consideration.
The way forward is expression, not extraction. It’s about creating worlds where seasonal resets recycle value in fresh ways, where items feel genuinely earned through effort, skill, and persistence rather than bought through shortcuts.
A healthy system respects scarcity as a design principle—moments, achievements, and artifacts matter precisely because they cannot be infinitely duplicated. The idea that players primarily want another income stream must be cast out. Games are not financial instruments first; they are spaces of creativity, competition, and community.
It is time to sunset play-to-earn without regret and to recognize it as a detour rather than a destiny. The industry’s real momentum will come from returning to the values that have always sustained great games: joy, mastery, and meaningful play.
The resolve to build the next great generation of games will not come from token mechanics or speculative loops, but from honoring the player-first spirit that has always driven this medium forward.