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GameFi, which is a combination of gaming and finance, has recently seen its hype die down, in my opinion. I recall 2021/2022 when the sector grew by 2000%, demonstrating rapid development, and we were all excited about what was to come.

We've also seen some resurgence over the last couple of months with projects like Portal, BIGTIME, Pixel, Pirate, and the recently discovered Counter Fire trying to rediscover their form or revive the trend. However, this has been slow to achieve. Could it be that their tokenomics aren't sustainable, users aren't interested, or that the games themselves are boring? What do you think could be the cause?

The main reason was lack of interest. The projects were there, a lot of people made projects, but the user count to keep it going wasn't there for majority of them. If we consider stuff like Axie Infinity as gamefi, then we can say that there was just one of them which made some big user count, but even that had a trouble keeping it and dropped, the volume has to be kept going to make it work.

Think about it this way, some people will make money and sell it, so in order to keep the project going there needs to be people who constantly end up doing something to make this work.

This is why it is not that easy to make this work at all, we need to consider what could be good to keep going. This is why it is not an easy thing to do. You can't make it change anytime soon, it is not that easy, we need to consider how this is a very wrong time to make this work as well so we should avoid making big moves. This is why I believe that it will not be an easy thing to do.

Because all of them provide half baked games since it was developed from scratch by developers that recently assembled for the investment purposes only. Gamefi games is still subpar if you will compare it on the regular games that you can play on game consoles like PS, Xbox and Nintendo.

Gamefi is just became popular due to the feature that gives potential earning however most of this project doesn’t provide profit anymore when played that’s why there’s no interest anymore on this project. The only this project to pay is for user to purchase their tokens.

Hype and trends come and go, it's nothing to do with the specific asset gategory like gaming. Once in the while they will pop up and same arguments about changing the world again are heard by new people, who get hyped and buy the whole sector up. They will come and go, even bad ideas are coming back over and over again.

GameFi is just one of the many, just like Decentralized gambling, market places, tokenized synthetics, AI, RWA, DeFi, memes, nodes, staking, NFTs, some specific new ecosystem, decentralized social media, RegFI, Sports, Metaverse, Yield farming, Politcal tokens, decentrallized Health industry, ZK, DAOs, Computing, storage, commercial, P2E, passive income, rebase(which was the stupidest idea ever), exchange tokens, wallet tokens, casino tokens, fan tokens, scaling, music, arts, tickets, file sharing, launchpads, Presales (and everything related to that) and freaking decentralized logistic infrastructure.

They shouldn't and many of them are just nothingburgers, but i made my peace with the fact that they will trend and dump over and over again. So GameFI will come again. It might come with a different name and slighly different angle, and i don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's going to pump & dump as well, like it did last time. Secret to the success is not leaving to hold the bag next time.

I think one factor as well is that the market has been saturated already, and if that happens, crypto enthusiast will have this kind of fatigue with all the new GameFi coming up and so it was not that really sustainable.

And we have seen precedence already, historically, from IEO to IDO to whatever hype in every cycle, we see that it will die down and there will be the next hype. Right now it's the Ton over applications, everyone was developing on top of it, like games and gambling platform. GameFi, might not disappear but I do not think that it will become as hot as it used to be.

Aside the incentives that some of these games offered to users, there was zero interest for users to keep coming back after the incentives were no longer available. Some of these games have very boring storyline and lore. For instance, Heroes of Mavia is at least a 100% copycat of the popular web2 games - Clash of clans and Boom beach. They only did a few tweaks here and there and slap a token to it.  Axiel infinity has some BS token mechanism that didn't the flaws that DeFi Liquidity mining and farming had and that is the fact that if you give tokens rewards, it dilutes the price even further causing a downward spiral dumps as gamers will just sell on the open market every time.

I'm playing this gamefi game called "Spellborne" religiously, to tell you the truth the game is repetitive; the only reason I play is because they have confirmed airdrop. I'm sure reason to play is same with other users.

Without incentives there is no reason to play, hence I feel they die down fast, and add the fact that incentivization that usually comes with native tokens is prone to outside market influences, bear market strikes and people no longer find these game worth their time and they leave.

It could be all of those factors. And here are my explanations.

1. Low visual graphic, boring gameplay. - From what i have seen, the majority of crypto games are rarely have good graphics. we're at 2024. People know Unreal Engine 5 well. But, crypto game devs are using PS2 graphics for their games.

2. Poor tokenomics - Majority of crypto gaming developers have garbage tokenomics. Their in-game tokens have unlimited supply, which makes the in-game inflation become uncontrolled.

3. Non-profitable gameconomic - Play to earn is not giving you sustainable income now. Also, the majority of people invested during 21/22 have been losing their money due to inflation.

Most I have come across have 2D graphics, GTA 2 comes to the mind if I were to compare and I like to think when these crypto games see revolution like how mainstream video games saw in early 2000s then they may have some chance.

If some already established aaa title adopts crypto in their game, that'd be just as good. Example being, you can manage your in-game video game inventory on blockchain, trade with other players as how nfts get traded.

It got hyped because it was something new, and a couple of games that were initially released boomed since there were a LOT of projects that gave people rewards that could be translated/sold for irl money. Then the devs failed to manage the economy (and I don't blame them, it's pretty hard to balance it when it's influenced by a massive amount of bots that they can't stop lol) and it just spiraled down from there. Then again even if they did fix it, subsequent games never really had the appeal modern games had, unfortunately. Even adding strategic elements has its limits imo, especially if you want a LOT of people to play it.

GameFi hype happened with the end of the lockdown period where everyone was at home and there was more time to do more things but with the economic developments and the increasing possibility of recession and things like memecoin hype, AI hype SOL hype all of which will make investing in GameFi less compared to the past.

For those that are not familiar with gamefi and how it went before, it was crazy hype. And so,

Gamefi = Play-to-earn games.

Let's just say that gamefi is another form of the trend that we've got like in ICO. Basically, trends like that don't really last and that's why if someone is able to take advantage of a current hype and made a lot of money.

Reinvest it to something better like bitcoin that will always be at the top of the game of this market.

I could remember when axie came out in 2020, this same look like no lack of interest are filling the air, until when axie brings billions into its market cap.

We are in a bear market, the reason why we saw that pump was because of the rumour that web3 games are going mainstream, it was not a fade.

Later zilliqa introduced their gaming consoles, the thing is, behind the close door gaming is growing very big, don't listen to people saying there are lack of interest.

Sony PlayStation already introduced their layer 2 project called Soniuem, let people sleep on this, they will be shocked very soon, gaming will grow far bigger than anything else.

There could be a couple of factors that contribute to this. It’s going to be the attraction, loyalty, and continuous playing of the members. It’s not always going to be about tokenomics, but it contributes a big part of the supply and demand.

Are the projects you mentioned the only ones you think have gone down?

All your guesses are correct, there's not a single miss :D. Starting from tokenomics which can't be sustainable, look at how Axie Infinity used to be and compare it to now, it's hard to realize that the P2E which was once the most played is now no longer attractive because of the decrease in prizes, it's a kind of ponzi, whoever joins first, is the one who benefits. This is also followed by boring, in contrast to conventional games that don't involve crypto, P2E in crypto is boring, there's no fun there, most players only play to earn money, as the name.

Maybe now because their hype have died down already but before, many people are interested on them even though many are not genuine but only got influenced by the hype. This is the reason why we are always advised to not join a project that are only based on hype because we don't know their duration and they can suddenly died out causing us to lose our money instantly.

Crypto is a business and like any other business, there will always be competitors, so business owners should try their best to improve their projects in order to maintain their momentum. The problem in cryptos is that devs are greedy and only after the short-term profit. They don't have long-term commitments. IDK why but maybe they think it's a hassle. They didn't realize that they can still earn much better if they do.

Actually, there are many reasons, current projects are making developments and implementations to combine gaming and finance. Now, since there is less interest, there are also fewer investments in the sector. I think that the sector is still new and the GameFi sector will attract more users, players, in the future. A good ground is needed for this, and it actually started on the date you mentioned.

It seems like people never really got into GameFi. From what I can tell looking at different projects, it seems like they were running on investor funds and trying to pay people to use their inferior games, which led to ultimately nothing. I think gaming and blockchains are a match made in heaven, but I think Microsoft will need to lead the way.

Their economy always unsustainable one, the user who've played the game before TGE never coming back because the main reason they play in the first place because they want to receive airdrop from TGE.
entire concept of gamefi is flawed in my opinion. Basically from day 1, the game maker incentivizing people to play game so that they can gain some players and inflate the active player counts, but these people will flock as long as there's reward, take the reward aspect and they'll be gone in 1 second.


it reminds me of one of the most successful gamefi which is axie infinity, at early stage it was so popular everyone is making money, few years passed and the game showing signs of dying, the characters NFT dumped in price too.

When people were making 5-10 dollars a day from each account, and could have endless accounts, they were willing to spend money on it, sure you pay 300-500 now, but you make 10 a day for a good time, and then when you get enough money for another one, you spend that money again, and you earn. Basically as you can see in this calculation, people were both earning but also spending and that kept it going.

The moment bear market started in the crypto world, it was clear that you couldn't keep it high, but people spent thousands, so if it goes down they all lost and that meant that the interest was lower. It's just a bear market period it's that simple, in 2022 bitcoin was very low, every coin was very low, and that meant that people didn't really made that much money from crypto, this resulted with games to not be paying a lot, and that meant that it didn't worth too much like it used to.

This type of drop caused it to go away, but these are not regular coins or tokens, these are games, if you stop and be low then there is no recovery, while it has been two years since they are down, the game kept going, now you cna2t put in too much to recover it, they are just fully gone at this point.

Where you in crypto during axie infinity uprise? People got into gamefi. But the hype just died down. Some of the tokens too. Axie got to triple figures in price. But where's it now?.

I've been seeing counterfire tending lately. Bybit, bingx, gate are offering opportunities for traders for CEC. What's so special about this gamefi token though? Will do a deeper diver. And since I have a Bitget account. I'll likely check this out. Their launch pool seem like a safe bet for accumulation. Thanks..

Not all GameFi is "flash in the pan"...

Take a look at the historical (back to 2012) tables and plots of game assets linked to from http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

A good starting place for background info on those results is https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

You need to understand that everything has it own trend. I could remember when NFT was a big trend then when project team were making huge amounts of money from there project because of the hype and the trend then making huge numbers of investors subscribing. Now, we can see that the hype we heard then has reduced even in play to earn game.  Cryptocurrency market is mostly based on hype and we'll have to be very careful how we make investment because the market is very volatile and anything can happen at any time. Even in the coin market, price depreciate and appreciate at anytime.

Airdrop is just one thing that's keeping most of them together, if not some of those projects, DeFi. GameFi don't have real something that they are offering to the community; no one wants to invest where they can't expect something to profit from again, just like in the era of NFT, those who made good use of the trend took advantage of it and enjoyed it while some are counting their losses now, unless there is some introduced massive earning and reward on the GameFi system, which is what I think can bring people back to it again.

First it was Defi and what happened later after all the hypes and the trend many people were doing here with different projects launching on this forum, just go through the coin market cap and Coingecko and you will be surprised how these Defi coins are abandoned and similarly with Gamefi tokens, they are just another cashout trend in crypto, didn't you notice that meme coins and AI coins are no longer making trend again, it's because there time has passed.

Another thing that contributed to most of this project failure is because the Gamefi promises were too realistic to be true. When you go through some of this project Whitepaper, you will be skeptical about these things they mentioned to do but as soon as the token launch, it becomes another useless idea and investors keep jumping from one projects to another until the trend is no longer making money again. This problem need to be addressed.

Ultimately the underlying reason for almost all the dying in the cryptocurrency field seems to me to be the simple fact that almost everyone, almost all of the time, fails to remember, or fails to keep in mind, that MONEY IS AN IOU / MONEY IS IOUs.

Bitcoin is probably a lot to blame for this, or more fundamentally Proof of Work is probably a lot to blame for it, because Proof of Work coins can become so ridiculously expensive to "mine" that Proof of Work based blockchains can become a ridiculously expensive medium with which to represent your IOUs.

Bitcoin is the first and foremost exemplar because it is SO ridiculously expensive that it can very easily be regarded as not actually being money at all but, rather, a commodity.

A commodity that happens to be a ridiculously expensive medium to use for representing IOUs, possibly even if you use newfangled techniques like inscribing satoshis to represent your IOUs.

Failure to keep constantly in mind that money is IOUs tends to lead to massive failure to HONOUR the IOUs.

An important aspect of IOUs, immortalised in fiction by Lazarus Long burning the IOUs the community his frontier trading post issues them to uses as money.

Do you see it?

The point here is that as a character in Game X, which issues Currency Y, you are Game X, issuing currency Y.

Or as a citizen of civilisation A, which issues currency B, you are civilisation A, issuing currency B.

Your currency is YOUR IOUs !

AS a {citizen | character | player | etc} of {Game X | Civilisation Y | etc} you should be HONOURING your IOUs, not DUMPING them.

When you manage to get hold of some of your IOUs, your objective ought not to be to re-issue them again back out into the wild but, rather, to "keep them off the market", since only when every last one of your IOUs has been "honoured" - bought back - taken off the market - dare say, even, destroyed - will you finally be "out of debt" and thus in a position to begin to EARN...

-MarkM-

When cash flow only switches between cash and assets, when finances are in an unstable state, they may have to limit short-term gamefi play or will have to liquidate and convert cash for other issues, in general the decline of gamefi and many other aspects, defi, metaverse… is a normal state for the cycle and suitability.

people are playing these games just for the sake of reward and that's it.

they don't play it because it's fun, when it comes to fun aspect of playing the game I think we can pretty much say that people out there are willing to shell out some money to play a game that's actually fun but the opposite is happening to these gamefi projects.
they pay people to play their game to grow their userbase and then get funding from investors, in a nutshell it's just a business scheme where the player are the product.

therefore that's why these game never sustaining in the first place, because the game itself was made not to be a long term product, most of the game also just reskinned dead game that doesn't sell before.