Firstly, I'm just expressing my opinion. If you disagree on something, feel free to leave a comment.
Second, I try to not generalize as I'm not aware of all the games out there.
NFTs & Web3 Games
With the appearing of web3 & NFTs, developers saw the economic potential of NFTs and started integrating it into their games without giving time to learn and make sure that what they're doing is fully secure.
This is something that is very common on games and web platforms. Nowadays, anyone can create a website or a game and start advertising to get people to buy in-game items.
You can't just create a smartphone in a week and start selling. There is a lot of burocracy that you must go through. The product must be fully tested, must have all the certifications required by the target countries for the technologies and components used.
And this does not happen on web3 projects. Eventually, problems start appearing, you can see most of the projects being scams, suffering attacks or having bad tokenomics that isn't even able to sustain the game.
The P2E (Play to Earn) Concept
I believe the most dominant term for web3 are play to earn games. It's attractive, isn't it? Who doesn't want to play a game and earn some extra money on top of it?
There are many problems in this strategy and I will try to go through the most important ones.
Early Access Scams
Usually, these games work in a way that people who joined early have a huge advantage against others. If they buy an exclusive item, they can sell it later for a greater price.
With this in mind, everyone just try to get early on these projects to get limited edition items.
But everything is ok at that point, until the developers decide to just shut down out of nowhere. It's ridiculous how many projects are creating whitepapers and asking people to buy an advance subscription or item to fund the development.
Poor Tokenomics Design
When money is involved, a new layer is added to the game that must be well studied and planned. Most of these games are not ready for this. The have a small team of developers and artists which do not have experience in this area.
This causes the game to have super inflationary tokens and they must resort to do burning events so that people can burn their tokens for some useless low price item.
The Illusion
Most of the people are playing expecting to get some extra money, and these games are easilly getting people's money.
At the end of the day, games are still games, and people should play for fun. Nowadays, people just want to join these projects early so they can get early access, exclusive rewards and other attractive things.
There are plenty of impressive web3 games out there, but it's unfortunate that many of these games are not receiving the attention they deserve due to the reputation that web3 games are getting.
Final Thoughts
People should be more careful about these projects. They just see a lot of people joining a project, so they join it too, that's the "fomo" term in action here. At the start, these games have a lot of people investing money into the game, the token will rise and more people will join because it seems profitable. After some time, the early players start widthrawing the money and the token value starts decreasing.
And the early players withdraw the money because they know that game will not be profitable anymore. It's not a fun game, they just wanted to invest early to get some money.
So do not make drastic decisions. Evaluate the project properly and see if there is any point in the game other than the economic aspect.
The game should be fun to attract gamers, not investors! 😊