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Failing to consider sustainability and disallowing in-game asset ownership have taken their toll on play-to-earn games. Mythical Games is a Web3 gaming pioneer on a mission to deliver true asset ownership through blockchain. The platform also streamlines blockchain integration for developers and players, eliminating technical complexities so users can sign up with just an email address.
Despite their success, blockchain games have made some mistakes. Here are seven common ones and how smart platforms have learned to avoid them.
1. Focusing on technology instead of gameplay
Games that entail setting up external crypto wallets, managing private keys, or buying cryptocurrency before even getting started deter many potential players, especially those unfamiliar with crypto. The technical barriers cause drop-offs before players even experience the game. It’s a mistake to design a game entirely around minting, breeding, or trading NFTs and offer shallow or repetitive gameplay loops.
Critics of this blockchain game trope have gone so far as to call crises, speculation, and even money laundering the “unspoken promise of NFTs,” claiming Web2 games were far more enjoyable. While that’s quite extreme, it’s a fact that NFT marketplaces are characterized by decision fatigue and choice overload. The offerings are less like games and more like financial products.
 
Moreover, complex Layer-2 or custom blockchain solutions that require an understanding of gas fees, bridging assets, or staking mechanisms confuse players and make even simple actions feel like navigating a fintech platform rather than playing a game.
2. Underestimating the appeal of true asset ownership
Players didn’t own the assets they acquired in traditional blockchain games, and there was no tangible value in the time spent making progress. Mythical Games pioneered a deviation from this model by enabling verifiable ownership of land, items, characters, and other in-game assets. Players of FIFA Rivals, an arcade-style mobile game that launched on June 12, can own and trade digital collectibles, futuristic designs, and classic looks thanks to a partnership between Mythical Games and Adidas. Boot releases are linked to player performance, so when a player’s favorite striker scores, their squad levels up.
Players can trade NFTs or build dream teams on the Mythical Marketplace, a platform for trading assets across games within the Mythical ecosystem, including NFL Rivals and Blankos Block Party. They bring assets from different games together in one place, which eases management and transactions. Mythical Games boasts over 5.6 million active wallets per month and passed 3 million transactions within 48 hours of migrating to Polkadot.
3. Flawed tokenomics
Axie Infinity’s SLP token, mainly used to breed Axies, is a painful example of play-to-earn’s inflation challenges. The token’s value soared, but the rate at which it was generated far outpaced its use through sinks such as breeding. This imbalance led to chronic SLP inflation. The token’s value declined sharply, and player earnings plummeted. Overreliance on the influx of new players was the root cause of the token’s failure.
This tokenomics example from blockchain gaming highlights the challenge of balancing token sustainability and player incentives without external value drivers or solid economic sinks. Tokens need clear use cases that drive organic growth and demand. Rewards, staking, and similar mechanisms must be economically viable in the long term to prevent inflation.
Effective tokenomics involves managing supply through burns, caps, or controlled issuance and creating demand through incentives and utility. Game creators are now designing tokenomics to reward token holders for activities benefiting the project and enable them to benefit from any upside. Tokens are becoming a key lever in project marketing and the management of the stakeholder community.
4. Fragmented gaming infrastructure
Some Web3 game developers have been excessively reliant on a plethora of infrastructure solutions, including smart contracts, wallets, marketplaces, payments, and player analytics. Developers waste time integrating tools and technologies from too many sources. It also leads to security issues, additional maintenance costs, and potential points of failure.
Game development often relies on full-stack game engine solutions, and Web3 development also needs to be full-stack. More and more developers are considering interoperable standards and end-to-end solutions to ensure faster and more effective building and more pleasant experiences for players.
Mythical Games makes developers’ work easier by providing a comprehensive solution to integrate a secondary game economy seamlessly. REST APIs are the main integration path, with SDKs available upon request. The technology handles the underlying blockchain infrastructure, including marketplace functionality, NFT creation and management, and player wallet management. It is neither challenging nor costly to build an in-game marketplace.
5. Transparency is not the same as trust
The transparency of the ledger system doesn’t necessarily engender trust. Platforms believed making data available on the blockchain would increase perceived trustworthiness, leading to higher engagement and more users. Eventually, some of them launched public APIs, whose adoption skyrocketed because they gave developers easier access to the latest data.
The majority of developers eventually shifted towards APIs rather than reading data directly off-chain. Trust remained with developers after platforms began providing APIs in an unrestricted and ethical manner.
6. Storing too much data on the blockchain
A lot of data must be stored to support a game entirely on the blockchain. However, block space is not cheap, and players have to pay gas fees every time they need to save. Someone who had made a lot of progress would end up paying substantial gas fees. Eventually, platforms realized this was not scalable and stripped down blockchain interactions, including caching more data in servers and storing less data on the blockchain.
Gaming communities appreciated the reduction in gas fees. They cared about frictionless gameplay the most, and on-chain data lost its novelty after a few weeks of playing.
7. Prioritizing short-term gains over long-term satisfaction
Monetization may be important for sustaining a game’s growth and development, but the excessive fixation on play-to-earn mechanics at the expense of enjoyable and engaging gameplay ultimately alienated players, even leading insiders to pronounce play-to-earn games “dead.” Earnings-first communities crashed under market pressure in 2022, but the volatility did not affect games that focused on gameplay.
Speculative projects, especially those with tokens lacking utility, face a serious risk of market failure. Players value meaningful and authentic interactions. Before building the Mythical Platform, its team wanted to make sure each engineering decision was made with a player-first mentality. One of these decisions was to build a scalable and reliable backend to ensure support for the games. Another decision focused on the experiences that players would associate with their favorite Web2 games, the kind of design that would result in a pleasant and seamless experience.
Much of Web3 gaming history has been marred by overly financialized designs to appeal to NFT traders instead of true players. With its fast-paced battle system, NFL Rivals is a great example of a title building on core gameplay mechanics with Web3 elements.
The market is observing the acceleration of the attention economy, making it imperative for projects to prioritize player-centric designs. These designs incorporate immersive narratives, rewards based on skill, and gaming mechanics that transcend ‘earn-first’ structures. When these aspects are absent, players rapidly lose interest and turn their attention elsewhere.
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