It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the time to look back and consider what we learned during 2025 and how to make the most of that knowledge in 2026.
In this article we catch up with The Sandbox’s new CEO Robby Yung.
What was the most significant trend for blockchain games in 2025?
Robby Yung: I don’t know if this qualifies as a trend, but I did observe an overall tightening of the market, meaning that less games were being funded, and this means less teams were coming together to try to build in the space, and this led to an overall slowing of growth.
I think there was a general perception that building at the intersection of games and blockchain is not only difficult (it is), but something that was so substantially out of favour (judging mainly by the token prices of game projects) with the web3 audiences, that it was not worth substantial further investment.
As a result, the user activity was typically more focused on existing projects, especially those with strong and durable communities (Axie Infinity, Guild of Guardians, The Sandbox, etc.).
How did The Sandbox adapt to these changes?
We really tried to focus on grass roots community building and leveraging what web3 is very good at – rewarding and retaining users through ownership.
Shared ownership, when mated with a common purpose (entertainment, co-creation, etc.) is probably the most powerful tool we have as game makers these days, and this is something that we really tried to enhance.
How do you think this will change in 2026?
I think that in 2026 we should see a return of “alts” which, of course, includes game and game infrastructure tokens, and this will also lead to a renewed interest in games from the web3 native audience. This does not, necessarily, equate to onboarding more web2 users, which is something that we still very much need to do as an industry.
What was your favourite blockchain game during 2025?
My favourite blockchain game was Anichess, although I’m a bit biased, since it’s one of our games.
However, what I like about it is that it leans into lots of things that are great about building games in web3 – it builds on a simple, but proven model (chess), and provides incremental innovations (the spell mechanic) while really building a strong community through NFT collections, tokenised reward / competition mechanics, etc.
What’s your New Year’s resolution and what resolution would you enforce on the industry?
I think web3 game developers need to think much more about UI/UX and their user onboarding process, and I think they need to think about token rewards much more like cash UA spend, and this will help to avoid incentivising negative behaviour (i.e. farming with no resulting engagement).
Read all our End of Year features via the EOY 2025 tag.