BlockBeats news, on April 23, according to CoinDesk, data from the market making and trading company Caladan shows that Web3 games have burned up to $15 billion in pursuit of a token-driven future, but have failed to gain player approval. Caladan’s report states that about 93% of GameFi projects have effectively declared failure, with token values down about 95% from their 2022 peak, and financing for studios shrinking by 93% by 2025. More than 300 blockchain games have been shut down. The report notes: “Capital has been destroyed at every level,” with venture capital, retail NFT buyers, gaming guilds, and the tap-to-earn craze among Telegram’s 300 million users all being affected at the same time. Hamster Kombat lost 96% of its users within six months of launch, and the flagship gaming guild token YGG has dropped 99.6% from its November 2021 peak.
Individual cases are alarming: Pixelmon raised $70 million in its 2022 NFT sale, but no public game has launched even four years later; Ember Sword burned $18 million during its seven-year development, shutting down last May with no refunds; Gala Games was embroiled in litigation, accused of co-founders misappropriating $130 million worth of tokens; Square Enix quietly shut down its Symbiogenesis experimental project last July. Axie Infinity, once an industry flagship, has seen its daily active users plummet from a peak of about 2.7 million to around 5,500 today (according to DappRadar). The report cited a Coda Labs survey indicating that even at the peak of the hype, only 12% of players had tried crypto games.
The flow of capital is most telling: in 2022, games accounted for 62.5% of total Web3 venture capital investment, but by 2025 this proportion has dropped to single digits, with AI, real world asset tokenization, and Layer2 infrastructure attracting the redirected capital. Even Animoca Brands, the most active supporter in this field, has reduced the proportion of games in its portfolio to around 25%, shifting focus to stablecoins, RWA, and AI.