Web3 Gaming in 2026: Which Crypto Gaming Projects Are Worth Playing?
By Thomas Løvaslokøy — written with AI assistance and reviewed by the NorwegianSpark SA editorial team | Last updated: 2025-11-25
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The Play-to-Earn Crash and What We Learned
Axie Infinity's collapse is the defining case study in crypto gaming failure. At peak, players were earning hundreds of dollars per day playing a mobile game. This attracted players motivated entirely by income, not enjoyment.
When the token price fell, income dropped. Players motivated by income left. Their leaving dropped prices further. A classic death spiral, amplified by the economic necessity that many players (particularly in Philippines and Venezuela) had become dependent on Axie income.
The lesson: sustainable game economies must be fun-first. If people only play for money, the economy is a Ponzi.
Second Generation: Games People Actually Play
Immutable-based games: Immutable zkEVM is becoming the preferred home for serious Web3 game studios. Gods Unchained (card game), Guild of Guardians (mobile RPG) — both have significant non-speculative player bases.
Pixels (Ronin): Farm simulation that attracted 1M+ daily active users not because of yield, but because the game loop is genuinely enjoyable. The token economy is secondary.
Big Time: Action RPG with NFT cosmetics. The key insight: NFTs as cosmetics (purely optional, no gameplay advantage) rather than essential items removes the pay-to-win critique.
Parallel: Elite sci-fi card game building on a year-plus track record. CCG mechanics genuinely competitive with Web2 card games.
The Investment Perspective
Investing in game tokens is extremely high risk. Game tokens are a bet on a specific game's sustained player retention — notoriously difficult to predict even for traditional games without blockchain complexity.
If you want exposure to Web3 gaming: gaming platform tokens (IMX, RON) diversify risk across multiple games vs. single-game token exposure.
Why the First Generation Failed Structurally
The collapse of play-to-earn was not bad luck or a market cycle. It was a design problem, and naming it is what makes the second generation assessable:
- Rewards were paid in a token whose price depended on new players buying in.
- Existing players sold rewards to realise value, creating continuous sell pressure.
- Growth had to accelerate simply to absorb it.
- When growth slowed, the reward token fell, which reduced the incentive to play,
which slowed growth further.
The loop is self-reinforcing in both directions, and the direction is set by whether new money is arriving. A game whose economy requires growth is not a game with an economy.
What a Sustainable Version Requires
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| People play it without the earning | The only demand that is not reflexive |
| Value flows from spending, not from issuance | Players buying things, rather than new tokens |
| Sinks that remove tokens and items | Without them, supply only ever grows |
| The game is good on its own terms | It competes with games that cost nothing to try |
| Ownership adds something | Otherwise it is a database with extra steps |
The first and fourth rows are the same test in different words, and they are the ones almost every project in this category still fails: would anybody play this if the token did not exist?
Assessing a Project Honestly
- Play it. Most of the assessment is available in an hour and almost nobody does it.
- Look at retention rather than wallet counts. Wallets are cheap to create and
incentive campaigns manufacture them.
- Find the sinks. Ask specifically where tokens and items are permanently removed
from circulation.
- Read the emission schedule and who holds the unvested supply. A cliff arriving in
the next year is a known future seller.
- Check who funded it and on what terms, since early investors' unlock schedules
determine a large part of the price behaviour.
- Ask what happens if the studio stops. Assets on-chain survive; a game server does
not, and an item with no game is a record of an item.
The Investment Position
Any game token is a concentrated bet on one product's retention, which is a very high bar in an industry where most titles fail regardless of their technology. That makes these positions closer to venture-style outcomes than to asset allocation: mostly zeroes, occasionally very large, and impossible to size sensibly except as money you can lose entirely.
If you hold any, hold them as the smallest, most speculative sleeve of a position that is itself already small — the sizing logic in crypto portfolio construction.
Capital at risk. Game-token values depend on a single game's retention and can go to zero; this is not financial advice.
Never invest what you're not comfortable losing entirely. The history of game token performance is mostly losses.
Content on AICryptoCoin is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.
