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| By Jurica Dujmovic |
You know me as a tech and crypto expert. And if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll also know I’m an NFT enthusiast, as well.
But what most people don’t know is that I’ve been a gamer far longer than I’ve been anything else.
Through the years, games were my way to unwind.
So, you’d think when the gaming and crypto worlds combined to form the GameFi narrative, I would have been thrilled.
But in fact, it was the opposite.
I’ve never truly gotten into crypto games.
Not for lack of trying. But as a gamer, almost nothing about the experience speaks to me.
And I’m hardly alone.
Most traditional gamers see the crypto gaming sector for what it is: still a work in progress.
And with established game studios like Larian, FromSoftware, CD Projekt, Riot or Valve pumping out high-quality games, it’s clear where they’d prefer to spend their time.
And their money.
But if that rift can be mended — as I believe it can — there is an impressive opportunity for new crypto games to dominate.
And opportunities for investors to benefit.
Why Crypto Games Failed to Hook Traditional Gamers
1. They Financialized the Fun out of Everything
Early crypto games treated blockchain not as a tool but as the core experience.
Ultimately, the “gameplay loop” looked something like this:
- Buy an NFT
- Stake a token
- Harvest something
- Sell it
- Repeat until you’re bored or the economy collapses
For most players, it felt like DeFi activity with a cool looking skin.
Traditional gamers don’t boot up their PC to check yield.
We don’t sit down after work thinking, “You know what would help me unwind? A volatile dual-token economy.”
When every action revolves around extracting value, the emotional experience changes. It stops being play and starts being work.
2. Mandatory Financial Commitment Is a Non-Starter
Imagine telling someone they need to buy a $400 sword before they can start the tutorial.
That’s how the first wave of crypto games felt.
Related story: Off the Grid Is a Blockchain Game Changer
Gamers have accepted optional microtransactions and cosmetic shops, sure. But they’re allergic to mandatory buy-ins just to participate.
Even premium AAA titles cost less than some crypto games’ “starter packs.”
Crypto gaming’s onboarding looked like this:
- Create a wallet
- Secure seed phrase
- Bridge funds
- Purchase NFTs
- Pay gas
- Then, maybe, you get to click “Play”
Meanwhile, normal games, you just double-click the icon and start playing.
3. Crypto Teams Misunderstood the Craft of Game Design
Traditional game studios spend years fine-tuning every detail of the game experience.
They focus on storytelling, combat feel and mechanics, graphics and animation responsiveness, level and boss encounters and so much more.
Which is why the best games often spend years in the development and production phases.
Most crypto studios, by contrast, poured their resources into the economics of the game.
Their development hours went into ...
- tokenomics
- presales
- roadmaps
- rarity charts
- marketplace features
The result? Games that felt like prototypes wrapped around a whitepaper.
For a dedicated gamer, it’s like swapping the latest award-winning blockbuster gaming experience …
For something as exciting as Candy Crush.
This isn’t to say crypto developers lacked passion or talent. But many were simply coming from web3, not from decades of traditional game design culture. And it shows.
The problem wasn’t malice. It was a mismatch of backgrounds and expectations.
4. Crypto Distracts from What Makes Games Meaningful
Games are art and craft. They’re engineering and emotion.
They succeed because they capture imagination, create flow states and help us forget the world for a few hours.
Crypto games right now do the opposite.
They constantly pull players back into reality by making market volatility and economic anxiety key to gamers’ experience.
And when gameplay turns into a grind to maintain your ROI, you’re not playing anymore.
You’re working a part-time job.
How to Grab Gamers’ Attention for Real
Let’s be clear: Gamers aren’t against blockchain.
They’re just waiting for crypto to provide real value to their games ... without getting in the way.
Which is why the first big change for GameFi to attract gamers is crypto must become invisible.
Players shouldn’t need to understand it to enjoy the game.
And all barriers to start playing should be removed.
No one should have to touch a wallet, write down a seed phrase, calculate gas fees or swap a token just to play a game.
The crypto mechanics should happen under the hood, the same way a physics engine does.
We saw this very same issue play out with exchanges.
Decentralized exchanges were too unknown for many average investors to confidently navigate.
It was only when regulated centralized exchanges came into play that more retail investors were able to buy and trade crypto frequently.
Why? Because centralized exchanges streamlined the process in the background and gave people an easy-to-navigate user interface.
If a studio can’t get to that level of simplicity, mainstream gamers won’t bite.
The second change seems equally as obvious: Gameplay must come first, economics second.
The studios that win will be the ones that prioritize actual gameplay.
They’ll produce finished games before selling their token. They’ll build mechanics, not markets. And they’ll focus on fun-first, not token-first, loops.
Crypto can enhance a good game. But it can’t rescue a bad one.
Finally, blockchain tech should solve real gamer problems … not ones invested just for the blockchain to fix.
There are legitimate use cases for in-game token sales, such as …
- True ownership of cosmetic items or collectibles
- Player-driven economies where supply/demand comes from gameplay, not speculation
- Modding rights encoded on-chain
- Inter-game identity that travels with the player
Done well, these features could meaningfully improve gaming.
But they should feel like optional quality-of-life improvements — not mandatory barriers to fun.
Some Games Are Moving in the Right Direction
To be fair, not every crypto gaming studio is repeating the mistakes of the first wave.
A few newer projects are at least inching closer to what traditional players expect.
Not because they’ve cracked the formula. In fact, I’d say that most haven’t.
But for the first time, you can squint and see the shape of something that resembles a game rather than an investment product.
Take Big Time as a solid example.
It’s still early, still repetitive and still rough around the edges according to most mainstream reviews.
But it does one important thing right: It lets people jump in and swing a sword without first opening MetaMask.
Players describe it as a decent, fast-paced co-op RPG with real moment-to-moment action. It’s not groundbreaking, but clearly built to be played, not optimized for yield.
Pixels falls into a similar category.
It’s basically a cozy farming massive multiplayer online game (MMO) with crypto attached, rather than the other way around.
Critics who normally avoid web3 entirely have called it surprisingly pleasant: simple, social, low-pressure.
Yes, the token layer is still present. And yes, the grind shows through.
But at least the core loop works whether or not you care about owning anything.
Even Gods Unchained — one of the earliest real web3 games — shows hints of the right priorities.
You can install it on Epic or mobile like any other trading card game: Just get a starter deck and play competitive matches without touching a wallet.
Reviews from traditional card-game players tend to land in the same place: solid mechanics, functional balance, a bit grindy and a bit clunky.
But fundamentally a real card game.
The blockchain layer sits underneath rather than in front of the experience, which is more than can be said for most of the genre.
None of these titles are revolutionizing anything yet. But they’re meaningful for a different reason: they show that when crypto steps back, something playable starts to emerge.
They’re early signals that the medium can eventually grow out of its “finance first” adolescence and into something that feels like games again.
Don’t Hate the Game, Wait for the Right Play
None of this is meant as a dismissal of the entire web3 gaming space.
In fact, GameFi has been one of the most successful sectors year to date, according to DeFi Llama’s narrative tracker.
It came in second with a 40% market cap gain, second only to memecoins’ 80% jump.
But this is not the final level.
Real gamers haven’t flooded the space yet. They won’t until the standards can match non-crypto games.
Once they do, however, I believe we can see this sector truly shine.
So, despite this year’s impressive performance, I don’t think any current games will be the ultimate winners.
That means patience will be a key part of your strategy if you want to ride this narrative.
It’ll take time for the industry to level up and offer a game that could finally bring gamers on the blockchain, rather than just gamifying their investing.
That game will definitely be one to watch for.
And one that you may be able to ride higher.
Best,
Jurica Dujmovic
P.S. As I said, one of the brilliant use cases for crypto in gaming is ownership of in-game assets.
That’s because tokenization can grant indisputable ownership for digital assets in a way never before possible.
And this revolutionary idea is beginning to trickle into TradFi. BlackRock recently launched a tokenized money market fund worth over $2.5 billion. Its end goal is to tokenize $10 trillion worth of assets.
And there’s an off-chain way to play this narrative that could be even more explosive than on-chain opportunities.
My colleague and fellow tech expert Michael Robinson just issued several reports on the TradFi companies at the heart of the $19 trillion crypto boom.
