Welcome to the June edition of BlockchainGamer.biz’s regular Mavens group.
Three years on from the boom in blockchain game funding, what do you think we can now learn from those companies that have shut down and those which are thriving?
Parker Heath – Gaming Lead, Ava Labs
The biggest lesson is simple but underappreciated: building and launching a successful game, especially in web3, costs significantly more time, capital, and talent than most teams originally anticipated. The era of easy raises during the 2021 bull market led to many teams optimizing for funding decks, not game design. We saw a wave of concepts funded at the prototype or idea stage, without a grounded plan to deliver a full game or reach real players.
In contrast, the teams that are thriving today are the ones who approached development with long-term vision, traditional game development experience, and a realistic go-to-market strategy. They did not treat web3 as a gimmick or shortcut. They integrated it thoughtfully into compelling gameplay loops and focused on building community early. These teams often raised more than others thought necessary because they understood they were building both a game and a new distribution channel at the same time.
Mitja Goroshevsky – GOSH co-founder, Acki Nacki co-author
Gaming in general has slowed down over the last three years – not just blockchain. Big names like Ubisoft have scrapped projects, and even EA shut down popular mobile games like Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile.
Gaming itself is still alive, blockchain included, but the days when you could copy-paste a web2 game, slap some NFTs on it, promise a 10,000% return, and thrill people – for a month or two – are gone. Too many worthless tokens, too many painful lessons learned. Now if you want a blockchain game, brace yourself: it’s double the work. You need both genuinely fun gameplay and tokenomics that don’t implode overnight.
Rebecca Liao – Co-founder and CEO, Saga
You have to build a great game first. The projects that vanished were often just token speculation disguised as a game. They chased hype and fundraising but forgot to build something fun, so when the buzz faded, there was nothing left to keep players engaged.
The games that are thriving now focus on being fun, period. They use blockchain subtly in the background to enhance the experience with real ownership and community rewards, not to define it. The technology should be a powerful bonus for player engagement, not the entire reason for showing up.
It’s also not surprising that an open, connected approach is proving more resilient than a walled garden. Siloing a game on one chain creates a dead end for players and their assets. The developers who embrace interoperability are building more dynamic and future-proofed worlds, weathering market shifts far better by giving players and creators true freedom.
Christina Macedo – Founder and CEO, PLAY Network
What used to be a wild “spray-and-pray” era of token drops, 1000s of NFTs campaigns, and pump-and-dump Discord hype has evolved into polished, data-driven launches that mirror your favourite free-to-play game rollouts. With VC funding drying up, investors aren’t just buying into big visions anymore – they’re pressing teams on real numbers: daily active users, retention curves, and how long the runway holds if token prices slide.
Studios have swapped flashy hype decks for solid business plans, living and breathing their CAC:LTV ratios, running pinpoint TikTok and YouTube campaigns, UA campaigns and A/B-testing every step of the onboarding process before even mentioning the token. They’ve moved past random hype tactics and embraced community-driven co-creation where players genuinely help shape the product.
And here’s the real game-changer: go-to-market isn’t a one-off launch or a mint-day stunt – it’s a continuous growth engine. The days of announcing an NFT mint, then going dark until the next funding round, are over. Today’s teams monitor retention metrics in real time, fine-tune the balance between token incentives and real-money purchases, and optimize their acquisition funnels so that sustained growth doesn’t depend on the next VC check.
In 2025, the old “raise, hype, cash out” model has been replaced by “build, measure, grow,” combining web2’s performance-marketing expertise with web3’s on-chain ownership and interoperability. If you’re still treating blockchain as a shortcut instead of a genuine strategic advantage – especially now that the funding taps have largely shut – you’ll find yourself falling behind.
Kyle Tut – Co-founder and CEO, Pinata
Three years after the blockchain gaming boom, the landscape has clearly matured, with a growing divide between projects that focused on long-term infrastructure and those that chased short-term hype.
According to DappRadar, web3 gaming funding fell by 71% in Q1 2025, yet the number of successful deals actually rose by 35%, reflecting a shift in investor priorities. Rather than pouring capital into speculative play-to-earn models, backers are now supporting projects that emphasize scalable tech, sustainable ecosystems, and real ownership. This aligns with the rise of decentralized tools like IPFS, which ensure asset persistence and security by removing reliance on centralized servers.
Games that embrace these principles, prioritizing interoperability, community, and player ownership, are better positioned to thrive in this leaner but more strategically focused era of web3 gaming.
Sam Barberie – Head of strategy and partnerships, Sequence
Post-morteming the web3 games funding boom requires us to remember a few realities:
- most startups fail,
- most games fail,
- a lot of the web3 gaming investments didn’t go into content.
So, it’s not surprising that blockchain-enhanced gaming is still waiting for its free-to-play moment; it was going to be an uphill battle to begin with.
Web3 gaming is a new paradigm, simultaneously a new distribution, UA, and monetization method, and requires technology that was, until relatively recently, unable to let developers make anything they wanted to. This resulted in a death spiral of “games,” mostly built by inexperienced developers, mostly with money from inexperienced gaming investors, created with technology that resulted in poor UX, all chasing the same 10,000 degens for the liquidity in their Metamasks.
Three themes emerged amongst games that shut down:
- Companies that chase shiny objects fail quickly. Hopping around to different gimmicks means you don’t focus and execute on a real experience.
- A token is a product, and most products fail. Most teams can’t manage a token and a game simultaneously. Companies that didn’t have the resources to build a game and manage a token typically did neither and closed.
- Choosing the wrong tech was the end for many. Custodial wallets, non-EVM blockchains, fragmented tech.
Studios leading the charge are using the blockchain as technology, not a feature, and experimenting with incremental benefits to their economics and players’ experiences. Here are some examples:
- Opt-in web3 experiences on web2 games boost KPIs. TapNation recently leveraged tokenized leaderboards for 40M+ players in Monster Squad Rush, seeing huge benefits in user retention.
- Gameplay first, web3 later. Moonray is a wonderful example of a studio that built a compelling game loop first, brought it to market, and is now ready to integrate the blockchain as something that enhances the player experience.
- Creating net-new experiences with the blockchain. Ubisoft’s Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E offered players a layered metagame experience even before the game launched with its Niji Warrior mint. Using GenAI avatar customization and a Ubisoft ecosystem wallet and custom mint platform and marketplace, Ubisoft gave players a dynamic, fun, and seamless experience unavailable to web2 titles.
Blockchain gaming has a long way to go, but the studios that are sticking around are committed, building with the right tools, and thinking about the player experience first, knowing that the benefits will come.
David Bolger – Gaming and consumer lead, Offchain Labs
The biggest lesson is that easy funding masked structural weaknesses.
In the 2021–2022 cycle, capital flooded into blockchain gaming, often backing teams without any real game development track record, something that likely wouldn’t pass VC scrutiny today. Many studios raised just enough to reach beta, but lacked the resources to deliver a full game with strong liveops.
At the same time, overfunding is a natural part of any emerging sector, where capital chases promise before fundamentals catch up. What we’re seeing now is a healthy correction: stronger teams are still building, while the rest served as expensive but necessary lessons.
Jack O’Holleran – Co-founder and CEO, SKALE Labs
The survivors focused on infrastructure and user experience over tokenomics. Too many projects during the boom treated NFTs and tokens as the core product instead of building genuinely fun games first. The companies thriving today understood that blockchain should be invisible – players don’t want to think about gas fees or wallet management, they just want great gameplay.
What killed most projects was putting speculation before playability. The lesson is clear: if your game isn’t fun without blockchain elements, adding tokens won’t save it. The technology should enhance the experience, not create barriers to entry. That’s why we built SKALE to be gas-free – because infrastructure should empower developers to focus on what actually matters: shipping games people want to play.
Quinn Kwon – Head of web3 strategy, Delabs Games
We’ve reached a point where the contrast between projects that have shut down and those that continue to build is more apparent than ever. There’s a lot to learn from both.
One of the most obvious lessons is that speculative mechanics alone aren’t enough. A number of projects relied heavily on tokens and financial incentives but didn’t invest the same effort in developing strong gameplay or fostering long-term user engagement.
Those that lasted tended to prioritize the fundamentals, making games people actually want to keep playing. This is why we focus on mid-core games, which are easy to onboard users with but also incorporate elements of fun and progression that drive retention.
Another critical point is the value of infrastructure and adaptability. The teams that are still active today were often the ones that planned beyond a single game or moment. They built systems that could evolve, both technically and operationally. Being able to adjust without starting from scratch is a significant advantage.
Community is also something that stands out. The companies that focused on meaningful community relationships, whether that’s through direct engagement, in-game social systems, or participatory design, seem to have built something more resilient.
Lastly, there has been a shift in how teams discuss and integrate blockchain. Many of the early projects were eager to highlight the tech, but the ones that are still around today tend to treat blockchain more like infrastructure than a headline.
Many projects have fallen off for various reasons, but those that remain are often the quiet, consistent builders focused on fundamentals.
Alexander Goldybin – Founder and chairman, iLogos
The main lesson from the past three years? Most teams weren’t building games, they were building token economies dressed up as games. The ones that collapsed were never serious about the product. They raised on hype, burned through budgets, and disappeared when the market turned. No surprise there.
The few still standing either had something real, gameplay, IP, or a strong team, or they pivoted hard.
This industry doesn’t need more funding rounds. It needs fewer chains, fewer pitch decks, and more actual games people want to play.
Until that happens, we’ll just keep watching cycles of rinse and repeat.
Anthony Palma – Head of gaming partnerships at Mysten Labs
After three years of investing in gaming at Mysten Labs, we’re constantly asking ourselves this question – and we operate on what we’ve learned, including:
- Ultimately a studio has to ship a great game that competes with the best games – web2 or web3 – in its genre to be able to succeed long-term. This sounds obvious, but many early studios in web3 emphasized their tokens and other web3 features rather than focusing on shipping the best possible game for all gamers.
- Game development expertise is great, but a team that has previous experience shipping and scaling games together is a better recipe for success.
- Games that target a web3-native audience exclusively can work, but remain niche until the general population becomes more familiar with web3.
- Play-to-airdrop only worked through the airdrop, similar to the early days of play-to-earn. If players are financially motivated rather than motivated by entertainment factor, they will leave as soon as the financial motivation does (post-airdrop).
- The jury is still out on whether gaming tokens can sustain long-term. Thus far, the best performing tokens have been either first movers – first “web3 games”, first Telegram games, etc. – but even those are almost all down 90%+ from their ATHs. We are still waiting to see proof that gaming tokens are viable IF they have proper utility within a game/ecosystem/platform.
- Capital to both ship and scale the game is paramount. Too many teams in gaming (both web2 and web3) raise just enough to launch their games and then cannot reach critical mass.
- Chains have to be able to deliver on scalability, predictably low cost, and user experience. Many studios prioritized large financial offers from chains over the functionality of the chain itself and ended up needing to work around technical constraints or change chains altogether, which is a significant opportunity cost.
There are multitudes of nuanced further learnings about game integration points, on/offramping for web3 newbies, platform restrictions and workarounds, and more. As much as we’ve grown as an industry over the past three years, I firmly believe we’re still in the early stages of what will eventually become a major paradigm shift for gaming. Web3 still has the ability to introduce fundamentally new ways to engage, retain, and monetize players while benefitting the players themselves with new game mechanics, depth, and true ownership. The first big breakout hits powered by web3 may already be live or may soon be coming, and when we see those improvements for both game studios and gamers, the rest of the games industry will take notice.
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