Recently I’ve been looking at the output data of a few on-chain gaming projects, and I have to say it’s a bit thought-provoking. People say chain games have “cooled off,” but it’s not that they’ve cooled down—it's inflation that has drained and crippled the pool. You set a high emission rate and pour tens of thousands of tokens a day into the pool; in the end, players take what they earn and swap it for stablecoins, or they dump it straight away. No matter how large the liquidity in the pool is, it can’t withstand this one-way siphoning.

The one that left the deepest impression on me was one of those that claimed “play and earn.” When the token price surged hard, who still remembered the release curve? By the time players realized the production speed was three or four times faster than the model predicted, the sell pressure was like opening a dam and letting water rush out. Put simply, the economic model has to be like building a ski resort—on the slopes, you’re constantly laying down snow going downhill, with no ski lifts or retaining structures pushing upward. Players will only end up falling at the bottom. Now many project teams like to tweak parameters—tune this, adjust that—always trying to bring emissions down into a “reasonable” range, but by then users have already left.

Recently I’ve been seeing all kinds of comparisons on the Layer 2 side—better TPS and more subsidies—but I feel it’s still better not to focus on pumping out stats first. Before that, you should think through the contradiction of the “emissions-versus-consumption” relationship. For my part, I think many chain games die from invisible inflation. It’s not that they don’t make money—it's that the money-making becomes a number game that evaporates all the live water in the pool. No matter how good-looking the data buckets are, without weight they can’t hold.