Play-to-earn rose to prominence at the dawn of blockchain gaming, where players were chiefly motivated by financial rewards. Ultimately, the focus on monetary gain engendered a lack of sustainability and an eventual decline across the genre, with at least 15 such games to close in 2025. These include titles like Blast Royale, Nyan Heroes, Blade of God, and Mystery Society, and even the developers are shuttering in some cases.
The servers of Blast Royale, a mobile game available on iOS and Android, will close on June 30. Derby Stars and Derby Race have met the same fate due to prolonged financial difficulties. In an X post on February 25, The Mystery Society announced it was suspending development due to challenges in securing funding. This is also the reason Nyan Heroes is closing, although it attracted over a million players during pre-alpha playtests on Steam and Epic.
Games require an elevated degree of creativity and content quality, and funds can be insufficient at any time, especially when they aren’t invested in development. Players are investors, and reducing them to mere spectators the way P2E did has not worked.
The inevitable transition to play-and-earn
While play-and-earn also enables earning through gameplay, the premise and execution of these games differ fundamentally from those of play-to-earn, which impacts their design. Platforms that succeeded P2E, such as Mythical Games, combine real asset ownership with entertainment and a creative flair. In play-and-earn and play-to-own, the primary focus is on gameplay. The marketplace of NFL Rivals, their best-known title with 7 million downloads, features NFTs on different rarity levels, and holders can buy, sell, or trade them when they reach level 5.
The arcade style of the game and the limited-edition NFT player cards foster a vibrant secondary market, having ingeniously tapped into collector culture. The MYTH token powers NFL Rivals, but blockchain elements remain optional, and gamers can play for fun or choose to dive deeper, trade, and earn. They must be familiar with NFL and American football.
Mythical’s upcoming title, FIFA Rivals, awaiting release in the summer of 2025, is expected to pull in as many downloads as NFL Rivals, if not more. Soccer dwarfs American football in terms of fan base, pledging an immense influx of new players to the Mythical Games ecosystem. The gameplay will combine NFT-based transfers and dynamic competition, allowing fans to join or manage squads and collect soccer icons.
Sports-based games appeal to major league enthusiasts, while Mythical Games’ Pudgy Party caters to a different player base and familiarizes casual audiences with blockchain elements. Pudgy Penguins, Mythical’s project partner, boasts a dedicated following, which Mythical intends to harness into an intuitive mobile game experience. Gaming via mobile devices has surpassed all other forms for almost a decade, reaching an average of 26 minutes daily in 2025. Mythical is also working on Blankos, its own platform game.
Simple gameplay and entertaining progression ensure sustainability
Play-and-earn games are designed to be fun and engaging above all else, ensuring that the gameplay experience, rather than financial incentives, motivates players. Earning opportunities exist, but they are not the main driver. Much like traditional games, most players participate purely for entertainment. A small number reach higher skill levels or invest more time and actively engage with earning mechanisms.
Simple gameplay, entertaining game progression, and an active social layer contribute to a game’s sustainability. Players must be encouraged to invite friends and compete in squads. Genuine engagement and enjoyment are what keeps them coming back. This approach also reduces the risk of burnout, which was relatively common with P2E games, where participants began seeing the game as a job.
Encouraging balance, not burnout
Gaming burnout is an unfortunate similarity P2E shares with esports. While there are no exact statistics for crypto game players, the data on professional esports players tells a somber story. A 2025 review explored 54 studies on esports and mental health, revealing a complex interplay between psychosocial skills, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and factors compromising mental health, including gaming addiction, burnout, and anxiety (82% prevalence in professional players).
Most people, on the other hand, engage with esports games like Fortnite or League of Legends only for fun and expect no financial gain. A minimal percentage of elite players compete for cash prizes in tournaments. Play-and-earn games can emulate this balance, allowing developers to create sustainable games with vibrant communities.
Earning opportunities exist as an extra layer for participants willing to invest more resources, which renders the ecosystem more resilient to crypto market volatility, a factor that adversely impacts P2E games that rely on financial incentives to keep participants engaged. An opt-in earning system that introduces the option to engage with rewards without impeding the core gaming experience is an example of this layer. The use of battle passes is a successful model borrowed from traditional games. The player can buy a battle pass to unlock access to exclusive items or rewards. The focus remains on entertainment for the rest of the players.
Another trend within play-and-earn is the use of competitions and rankings to reward top-tier players. Games can offer top players additional rewards by implementing leaderboards. These trends mirror Web2 competitive structures, where a subset of the best players access leaderboards, tournaments, or ranked leagues with rewards or cash prizes.
Web3 has redefined in-game ownership and control
Play-to-own, or P2O, is another gaming model that has succeeded the unsustainable P2E. It focuses on ownership of in-game assets, giving players complete control over all items they obtain throughout the game. These items are typically represented as NFTs, and players buy, sell, or trade them on external marketplaces. They hold value beyond the game, and even owners who stop playing the game maintain control of their collections.
The gaming experience emphasizes the curation of valuable assets over time instead of short-term gain. Utility, demand, rarity, and other such factors tend to determine the value of NFTs, mitigating some of the inflation issues token-based economies struggle with. The P2O model promotes long-term engagement as players are investors or collectors of the valuable assets they own, and their motivation to play remains intrinsic.
Image by Victoria from Pixabay
