Web3 Gaming Has Found Its Strengths – Now It’s Playing to Them
What’s blockchain good for? That feels like an easy question to answer in 2025, when blockchain is being quite literally used for everything, from tokenizing real-world assets to AI, DeFi, and digital authentication to name but a few. But it’s easy to forget that for a long time, between the technology’s creation in 2008 and the first switchback of its adoption S-curve a decade later, no one could really work out quite what blockchain was best equipped to do. During this discovery phase, there were plenty of pilots but few successes as enterprises and web3 developers alike struggled to get to grips with the technology.
It’s been a similar story with web3 gaming, which has been around for about a decade now, give or take. During this time, we’ve seen various attempts at creating games with blockchain components, from AAA RPGs with big budgets and video game-conquering aspirations to front-loaded P2E titles with token rewards galore but zero sustainability. The studios that were bold enough to experiment with these formats deserve credit for being trailblazers, even if few others have followed in their wake. Instead of retreading these steps, web3 gaming has returned to square one to identify what it stands for. And this time around, it’s got a pretty good idea of what it’s good at and where it’s going.
For the Players
In 2025, web3 gaming has splintered into a handful of verticals which, on first inspection, would appear to have little in common. What does sports have to do with retro gaming? Or collectible cards with MMORPGs? As genres, they stand apart. But as a formula, they share something in common: the most successful games within each bracket are all player-centric. That sounds obvious, but it’s something that many web3 studios overlooked during the first wave of blockchain-powered games.
If there’s one thing web3 does better than traditional gaming, it’s empower players to be the taste-makers, lore-creators, and universe-populaters. The best studios design the framework, create the initial concept, and grow a passionate community around it. But then they do something that would seem antithetical to conventional game studios: they take the keys to that kingdom and hand them to the public. Not to relinquish outright control, but to give players – those who put in long hours exploring the game, mastering its levels, and upgrading their characters – a say in what comes next.
True ownership of in-game assets driven by player-controlled economies. That’s what web3 gaming does best and it’s a playbook you’ll find in abundance across every successful web3 game you care to study, as an examination of just two incongruous titles shows.
Sports for the Sports Fans
Web3’s most successful sports game to date is, by some distance, NFL Rivals. Mythical Games’ debut release, created with NFL licensing, has racked up more than 6 million downloads and put the games studio on the map. In the process, it’s showcased the formula that makes for a great web3 game: seamless onboarding; abstraction of blockchain components; community-driven; focused around asset ownership, resulting in a vibrant in-game economy in which players trade NFL stars as NFTs on the built-in Mythical Marketplace.
As Mythical Games’ Head of Communication Nate Nesbitt recounts, one of the reasons behind NFL Rivals’ success was the decision to market as a sports game first and foremost rather than a web3 game. “We’ll know web3 gaming has won,” he reflects, “when it’s simply referred to as “gaming.” Until that time, there’s work to be done – first in raising awareness of web3 gaming, and then in obliterating the term altogether because we’ve reached a point of ubiquity, in which virtually every single game incorporates web3 elements.”
He adds: “We don’t talk about “connecting to the internet” anymore because everyone’s connected all the time. One day, we’ll nix the term “web3 gaming,” but for now it remains a pretty good descriptor for identifying the change agents in the space.”
In other words, Mythical struck gold by creating a game that a highly passionate group of fans – those hooked on the NFL league – would want to play and then marketed it to them. Most of these players had never previously played a web3 game, and thus took to it on account of the football gameplay and strategizing it offered – before getting hooked on the player-owned economy that came built in courtesy of web3 technology.
RPGs for the Fantasy Fans
MapleStory is very different from NFL Rivals. The 2D side-scroller has been a cult classic for almost two decades, becoming a firm favorite among MMORPG players, with hundreds of thousands of daily active users. Now it’s gotten the web3 treatment following MapleStory N’s launch on Avalanche this month. According to Sun Young Hwang, CEO of NEXPACE and head of the MapleStory Universe, “While building MapleStory N, we were dedicated to prioritizing our players and their gameplay experience.” This includes supporting user-generated content where players are able to create their own custom world and quests using the game’s core assets.
“From the beginning,” says Hwang,” we approached this project with a clear sense of purpose: to reimagine how game IPs can achieve sustainable, long-term growth. “Instead of endlessly minting tokens and leading to inflation within the ecosystem, the will help ensure the MapleStory economy remains responsive to player-driven demand…If we were to give it a name, this model could best be described as ‘Contribute-to-Earn’, a system where value is generated and shared through meaningful engagement across a decentralized, IP-driven universe.”
On the surface, MapleStory N looks nothing like NFL Rivals, and indeed from a player perspective, the two games could scarcely be more different. Yet a closer inspection shows the similarities between the titles: licensing much-loved IP; eschewing P2E in favor of sustainable tokenomic models; empowering players to take control; tapping into niche yet highly passionate and engaged communities. Not every successful web3 game needs to tick every one of these boxes. But the ones that resonate, having an impact that extends far beyond their genre and web3 at large, tend to cover most of these bases.
Web3 Gaming Knows Where It Stands
Gaming in general remains a highly competitive market in which there must inevitably be more failures than sequel-spawning smash hits. But within the still nascent web3 gaming industry, developers have gotten a handle on what they do best. And now they’re playing to those strengths. It turns out that players aren’t interested in tokens for tokens’ sake, or their every action being indelibly recorded onchain. But create something that’s fun and which rewards repeat plays and not only will they keep coming back for more but they’ll strive to own a piece of it – and then they’ll cultivate that soil.
Not every player wants to own their assets or expend countless hours of their lives hanging out with internet friends within virtual worlds. But a subset of gamers do. And to those players, the promise of owning a slice of that economy and having a say in where the game goes next means a whole lot. Those are the sort of players that web3 was made for. The industry has belatedly discovered this. Now it’s making up for lost time by cultivating the games these players have always dreamed of.