Web3’s afterlife of innovations continues. | Credit: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images.
* Dozens of Play-to-Earn games were shut down in 2025; player-owned economies are the new trend.
* NFT markets and tech innovations soared under Web3 gaming.
* Web3 metaverse games have died out almost completely.
Every few years, the crypto world buries its darlings, only for some of them to claw their way back.
From Play-to-Earn games to the metaverse and NFTs, 2025 has been a reminder that in Web3, death is rarely permanent.
What’s buried in one cycle can rise again in the next — sometimes stronger, sometimes stranger, but never quite gone.
As this Halloween season casts its long shadow over the markets, the ghosts of Web3’s past are back.
The once-forgotten dreams of player-owned economies, digital worlds, and blockchain-based assets are flickering back to life — though not without the scars of their previous downfalls.
So, what parts of Web3 truly died, which ones survived against the odds, and which might soon return from the crypt?
Welcome to The Web3 Afterlife — a post-mortem of an industry that refuses to stay dead.
Dead, but not Buried
Telegram Gaming
Through 2024 and 2025, a fresh wave of Web3 games promised to breathe life into the decaying Play-to-Earn (P2E) scene.
Telegram became the unexpected home for this revival, hosting a slew of games that blurred the lines between casual fun and token farming.
Titles like Hamster Kombat and Catizen drew millions of players with their airdrops — before collapsing under their own unsustainable tokenomics.
The 2025 hopefuls — Bombie, Capybobo, and others — tried to improve on that model with new mechanics and better incentive loops.
But the ghosts of their predecessors loomed large.
As it turned out, these games were less revivals and more reincarnations of the same Ponzi-like model — promising fortune for time spent, yet often leaving players with nothing but digital dust.
By mid-year, most of these “airdropped economies” had either pivoted or quietly disappeared, leaving behind a trail of disappointed players and empty Telegram channels.
The Metaverse
If Play-to-Earn was the first ghost to rise, the Metaverse remains its most famous corpse.
Starting off as a bold exploration of digital asset ownership in virtual 3D spaces with titles like Decentraland and The Sandbox, the concept of the Metaverse quickly spiraled into an overhyped land grab, quite literally.
Players and investors initially flocked to these innovative titles that tied together NFTs and crypto in 3D virtual spaces that players could own, build on, monetize, and explore.
The hype around it even prompted Mark Zuckerberg to go all-in on VR, rebrand Facebook to Meta, and build its own metaverse.
And whilst the AR/VR race has taken a backseat to AI, Web3’s virtual worlds are a shrinking dot reflected in the rear-view mirror.
After having their in-game land bought up by major companies, wealthy players, and early adopters, the gold rush dried up.
The Sandbox, which is arguably the “most successful” metaverse game, one that continues to provide regular updates and competitions, is a ghost town, recording little over a hundred daily active players in 2025.
For now, Metaverse gaming is dead.
Still Alive
Play-to-Earn
There’s an argument to be made that P2E has survived, though barely.
Titles like Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained, and The Sandbox (yes, still clinging to life) remain the flickering candles in P2E’s crypt.
The truth is, Play-to-Earn didn’t die — it evolved.
The P2E model has long struggled to balance out gameplay, tokenomics, fun, and player retention.
Aside from the basic P2E mobile games on Telegram, 2025 saw plenty of high-fidelity, well-made, fun games die.
Ember Sword was a high-profile tragedy. Despite raising millions through NFT sales in 2021 and private investments, the team announced it was shuttering the unfinished game due to funding issues.
Ironically, funding was a big issue for Web3 P2E gaming in 2025, which saw several other games like Blast Royale, Goombies, Anterris, and others fold of pivot toward traditional Web2 formats.
Developers have learned that sustainability doesn’t come from endless token minting, but from crafting games that are fun first and profitable second.
High-quality titles such as Legend of YMIR, EVE Frontier, and Star Atlas represent this shift.
Their economies no longer depend solely on speculative players but instead on deeper, player-owned systems — where NFTs, in-game assets, and governance are integrated naturally.
This new model — dubbed the player-owned economy — marks the next phase of Web3 gaming.
It’s not about chasing rewards; it’s about building digital worlds that can outlive hype cycles.
The games that get this right could finally break the curse.
Coming Back From the Dead
NFTs
No discussion of Web3’s undead would be complete without its most polarizing revenant: NFTs.
Love them or hate them, NFTs are back in business thanks to Web3 gaming.
With Web3 games, NFTs evolved beyond collectible images with unique traits and speculative prices to become unique, high-utility, in-game assets.
In modern Web3 games, your in-game character can be an NFT, and their weapons, armor, equipment, and items can all be NFTs.
Even AI-powered non-playable character (NPC) companions can be represented as NFTs.
Now, they’re reaching beyond Web3 and into traditional gaming spaces.
One example of this is Ubisoft’s partnership with Immutable to launch Might & Magic: Fates, a trading card game where the cards are NFTs.
The difference with this title compared to others, such as Splinterlands, is that they are optionally tradeable with no required purchase to play or compete at the highest level.
These advances have been much-welcomed and suggest NFTs have a bright future ahead of them, especially as the aforementioned player-owned economy model proliferates.
The Final Resurrection
As the candles burn low on another crypto cycle, one thing is clear: Web3 isn’t dead; it’s just evolving in strange and unpredictable ways.
The projects that vanished were never sustainable to begin with.
The ones that remain, and the few clawing their way back, are doing so because they’ve learned to balance innovation with realism.
Hype may still drive discovery, but survival now depends on utility, design, and trust.
For all its failed experiments and half-finished dreams, Web3 remains an engine of constant reinvention.
Each collapse wipes away the excess, leaving behind the ideas that might actually work.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson of the Web3 afterlife.
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