For the past few days, I have been living in the “money + infra + impact” part of Web3 – stablecoins, regenerative finance, DePIN, identity, and then finally asking myself what I would actually build next in Day 46. Today I want to zoom out, take a quick detour into GameFi, and explain in plain language what “play-to-earn” tried to do, why so many of those games died, and what I am taking away for my own project rather than pretending I am going to build a full Web3 game.
If you want to keep up with this 60-day Web3 journey, you can follow me on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community.
In the last article (Day 46), I stopped just “learning concepts” and picked a concrete project: a small impact-focused dashboard that sits at the intersection of DeFi, DePIN, and identity instead of yet another token. Before I go deeper into building that, I want to understand one big hype cycle we all watched from the sidelines: GameFi 1.0 and its promise that you could “play games and earn a salary”.
If you strip away all the buzzwords, GameFi 1.0 was basically this: take a game, put some NFTs and tokens on-chain, and promise that players could earn real money by playing. In practice, that usually meant you bought an NFT character or item, used it to grind some in-game activity, and earned a token that you could sell on an exchange for stablecoins or fiat.
The idea sounded powerful on paper. Games already have virtual economies, players already grind for in-game rewards, and crypto already has tokens and marketplaces, so the pitch was “what if your in-game items and points were real assets you could trade freely”. On top of that, teams layered in staking, liquidity mining, and yield farming mechanics that we had already seen in DeFi, but now with cute characters and guilds instead of LP positions.
Once you apply the same DeFi lens we used for stablecoins and yield from earlier in the series, the first uncomfortable question appears very quickly: where does the money for “play-to-earn” actually come from. In many GameFi 1.0 projects, the answer was “from new players buying in”, from emissions of the game token itself, or from speculative token price spikes that could not last once growth slowed down.
If you have been following the earlier days on stablecoins and DeFi, this should feel familiar. A token with emissions but no sustainable sink or real demand behaves like an unsound yield farm, and once incentives weaken, most people leave.
The money problem was only half of the story. The other half was the games themselves. A lot of GameFi 1.0 titles were not particularly fun on their own, and the main motivation was financial: players joined to farm tokens, not because they loved the gameplay. You can see this clearly in breakdowns of the “play-to-earn” cycle and why so many titles bled out once rewards dropped (YouTube breakdown).
That created a fragile loop.
From the outside, it looked like a textbook case of misaligned incentives. The game needed long-term, engaged players who cared about the world, but the token design attracted short-term yield farmers who cared about ROI first. Once macro conditions turned and new inflows slowed, there was nothing left to hold the system together.
The reason I am even looking at GameFi in this series is not because I want to build a play-to-earn game, but because it is a clear lesson in how not to design incentives. When you attach money to every action, you turn players into workers, and suddenly the question is not “is this fun”, it is “is this worth my time compared to other income sources”.
That is useful for someone like me who just decided to build an impact and infra dashboard instead of a token. For my project, I still want some “game-like” mechanics – quests, streaks, soft rewards, maybe even social leaderboards later – but I do not want people to feel like they are grinding a job just to keep up. I want the core motivation to be: “this helps me understand what my on-chain money and infra usage is doing in the real world”, not “this pays me”.
So what am I actually taking from GameFi 1.0 into the rest of this 60-day journey. I am keeping the ideas that make sense for coordination and for my own project: clear goals (quests), visible progress, seasons or chapters, and light social proof. I am leaving behind unsustainable emissions, pressure to farm every day, and the promise that you can replace a salary by clicking buttons in a low-skill game forever.
Later, when I write about how I want to design “v0” and v1 of my dashboard, I will probably borrow some of those game-inspired ideas: small challenges, visible streaks, maybe non-monetary badges for people who keep tracking their impact and infra usage. But the core of the project stays closer to what we have already discussed: DeFi rails, stablecoins, regenerative finance, DePIN, identity, and one place where a beginner can see how all of it connects.
If you want to follow along as I keep learning, building, and occasionally changing my mind about Web3, you can find the rest of this 60-day journey on X, on Medium, on Future, and you can join the Web3ForHumans Telegram community to discuss these topics in plain language.
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