Gaming vets promise to make blockchain games fun and sustainable

techcrunch.com:

The runaway success of Axie Infinity and StepN has convinced a flurry of entrepreneurs that web3 gaming, where the ownership of in-game assets is in the hands of users via blockchain adoption rather than a centralized platform, is the future.

Some of the biggest hits in the space to date reward users with tokens that can be cashed out in what’s known as the “play-to-earn” model. While P2E games have attracted millions of players and billions of dollars from investors, veterans of the gaming industry argue that they are fundamentally unsustainable.

These games are the brainchild of financial engineers aiming to get rich quickly rather than experienced developers building time-honored works, they say.

Axie Inifity’s dramatic rise and fall is telling. After peaking at$754 million in November when bitcoin hit all-time high, the game’s monthly sales volume plummeted to $4.5 million in July.

“Most GameFi developers are not game developers,” says Maciej Burno, who’s spearheading the new metaverse business of Polish gaming studio Reality.

Burno is among a spate of blockchain-believing gaming veterans around the world trying to take blockchain games to the mainstream. Their vision is to counter the public impression that web3 games, popularized by P2E, are all scammy and trashy. Instead, they want to build games that are both fun and sustainable, while introducing cryptocurrencies as a novel way to incentivize gamers as well as creators.

The problem with P2E, as seen by See Wan Toong, a former senior technical director at Electronic Arts and CTO of web3 gaming startup Red Door Digital, is that users have to spend money upfront to start playing.

In Axie Infinity, users buy and breed cute blob-like creatures called Axies in the form of