Recently, many people have said that blockchain games are the best entry point for beginners into Web3. I thought about it, and I think this statement is only half correct.

Blockchain games are indeed attractive, but the problem is that they have been caught in a fundamental paradox from the start: on one hand, they say they want players to make money, and on the other hand, they need to ensure the game is fun. These two goals are inherently conflicting. When all design efforts revolve around economic models, gameplay becomes just a façade.

I’ve seen the death processes of many blockchain game projects, and they generally fall into two patterns. One is like Axie Infinity—a play-to-earn game where players need to buy NFT assets before they can start earning tokens. The entire economy system resembles a three-layer structure: investors buy governance tokens, new players buy game assets, and underlying token outputs allow players to cash out. It sounds good, but the fatal flaw is that the value of the underlying output almost entirely depends on the entrance funds of mid-tier new players. The game itself doesn’t generate any external value. Once the growth of new players slows down, the tokens start to depreciate, earnings decline, and fewer people join, creating a death spiral.

The other, more straightforward pattern is a DeFi yield farm disguised as a game. You think you’re "fighting" and "exploring," but in reality, you’re just performing on-chain operations like staking and liquidity mining. The returns rely entirely on project token inflation and the later participants pushing up the token price. Gameplay here is basically nonexistent; it’s just a way to lower users’ psychological barriers to participating in DeFi.

Both patterns share a common dilemma: to ensure economic sustainability, inflation must be controlled and output capped, which directly harms the "making money" experience for players. Conversely, to increase game fun, randomness and balance are needed, which can undermine the financial stability of asset values. The final result is that financial returns become the only guiding force, and players turn into miners chasing APY, while the original intention of "fun" is systematically abandoned.

But I have to say, although blockchain games are full of bubbles, this experiment still has value. It was the first time in the global market that standardized digital behaviors were nearly real-time priced. It exposed a harsh truth: under a purely free market, the value of undifferentiated digital labor is quickly squeezed close to its marginal cost. This prompts us to reflect—what are the truly scarce and irreplaceable things in the digital world?

Additionally, a successful blockchain game economy system is as complex as a small country, involving currency issuance, fiscal policy, market trading, and social security. All data is transparent on-chain, like a real-time economic laboratory, showing how excessive money supply leads to inflation, and how supply-demand imbalances trigger crashes. Those failed blockchain game cases are more vivid than any economics textbook.

The real way out may not be to strengthen "making money," but to redefine ownership and return to the essence of playing. The core breakthrough of blockchain games is that players truly own game assets, which can be freely traded on secondary markets. Even if the game shuts down, your legendary weapon NFT remains in your wallet. In the future, cross-game asset composability might also be possible. Through DAOs, veteran players can participate in real decision-making rather than just complaining.

The future successful blockchain games are likely not those with the "highest financial returns," but those with the "most widely accepted assets, most active communities, and most interesting gameplay." The economic system should exist like real-world infrastructure, serving the core entertainment experience, not the other way around.

Ultimately, the dilemma of blockchain games points to a deeper Web3 issue: how to define and reward contributions that cannot be simply quantified? When gold farming can be precisely priced, what is the value of behaviors that energize communities, foster important collaborations, and create touching stories? This question is leading us toward another frontier of Web3—SocialFi. There, the object of value capture is no longer virtual output, but humanity’s oldest assets: attention, relationships, and influence.