Lately I've been pondering a question: Why does the GameFi market keep repeating the same stories?

I've noticed that, fundamentally, GameFi is a bilateral compromise between capital and gaming. Traditional games focus on "fun" and "experience," while financial systems pursue "returns" and "arbitrage." In theory, this should create a "play and earn" effect, but in reality, it's quite the opposite—most projects follow the old path of "playing and crashing."

Where does the problem lie? The core mistake is treating "games" as tools for issuing tokens. Look at those GameFi projects; from day one, the question isn't "how to create a world players want to spend 1000 hours exploring," but rather "how do we issue tokens and use some game concept to hype a wave." All subsequent designs—NFTs, tokenomics, quest systems—are just to craft stories during the initial launch. The result? Early investors sell off, communities take over, products stop updating, tokens go to zero. Every GameFi project’s cycle resembles a copy-paste script after Axie Infinity’s crash, just with a different name repeated.

There's also a fatal issue: many projects treat "economic systems" as the core gameplay. Clicking quests is packaged as mining, token withdrawal cooldowns are called reward waiting, and token price drops are labeled as correction phases. These are financial behaviors, not gameplay. When players want gameplay, you give them a profit calculation table; when the token crashes, you think about enhancing the gaming experience—by then, it’s too late.

As for the sustainability of "play and earn," honestly, it’s a Ponzi problem. P2E was popular because liquidity overflowed with new players constantly entering, but anything that requires continuous new buyers won’t last long. Only games worth long-term play can evolve from P2E into "play while staying." But developing such games requires top-tier planning, art, sound, operations, and long-term content updates to build IP culture. Currently, almost no GameFi teams can do this.

I’ve looked at projects in the market, mainly divided into three categories. The first is led by financial teams, with gaming as just a tool—think of the clicker games in the Ton ecosystem—if the ecosystem can’t expand, it collapses immediately. The second is traditional Web2 game teams transitioning into Web3—understanding games but not tokenomics—like the test version of RO Legend of the Rune, which is a good game but the token price is a mess. As for "dual-knowledge" teams that understand both gaming and finance, I haven’t seen a truly successful example yet. The closest to success in this cycle are projects like Line + Kaia’s game ventures and Nexon’s MapleStory blockchain plans, but they still need market testing to become real GameFi successes.

So, what’s the real solution? I believe GameFi needs to shift from "capital-driven" to "culture-driven." It’s not about telling players "you can play and earn," but about fostering a culture through this process—like the guild culture in World of Warcraft, the war culture in EVE Online, or the trading market culture in RuneScape.

A GameFi project that can escape the bubble should have three qualities: it should be rooted in cultural value, use gameplay as the core for retention, and have a controllable economic model that supports rather than dominates. Simply put, GameFi shouldn’t be about packaging finance with games, but about using finance to drive the cultural cycle within the game.

Honestly, the market will always have capital games, and arbitrage opportunities will exist in GameFi. But if you want to grow big, instead of fooling the market with "good games," it’s better to face reality—find mechanisms that allow users to enter and exit smoothly, and understand players’ behavioral cycles. If you can’t do that, developers might as well be straightforward: admit we’re making a gamified Ponzi, using games to package tokens, abandoning the narrative of good gameplay. This might be more pure and easier to succeed, like pump.fun—simple and straightforward.