Gaming tokens, live on the bubble chart

Axie Infinity took in about $1.3 billion in revenue in 2021, by most estimates, more than many established game studios made that year. Thousands of players in the Philippines were earning its SLP token as a daily income. Within a year, SLP had lost more than 99% of its value from its July 2021 peak, and most of those players had stopped.

Both of those facts are still the best introduction to crypto gaming. The bubbles on this page track the tokens attached to games, gaming chains and virtual worlds, sized and colored by how they're trading right now. Most of them were born in the same 2021 rush that made Axie, and most of them are still trying to answer the question Axie couldn't.

What is GameFi, and why the token usually arrives before the game

GameFi is the mix of video games and decentralized finance: in-game items as NFTs you own and currencies as tokens you can sell, plus, in some games, rewards paid out for playing. The "fi" half is ordinary DeFi plumbing, and if that part is new, start with the DeFi page's section on what is DeFi.

The awkward part is the order things happen in. A normal studio builds a game and finds players before working out how to make money. Most GameFi projects sold a token first, often raising millions before anything playable existed, because that's where the funding was in 2021 and 2022. The token then had to be worth something before the game was fun, which is backwards, and a lot of the price history on this page is the market slowly noticing.

That's also why gaming tokens behave more like early-stage startup bets than like shares in a business. Some are governance tokens for a studio or pay for transactions on a gaming chain; only a few are really used inside a game. Knowing which one you're looking at matters more than the bubble's color.

Play to earn, and the math that broke it

Play to earn sounds simple. You play, you earn tokens, you sell them. The problem is where the money for those tokens comes from.

In Axie's case it came mostly from new players, who had to buy three Axie NFTs to start, at prices that reached several hundred dollars per team in 2021. More, at the very top. Guilds lent teams to "scholars" who couldn't afford them and took a cut of their SLP. As long as new players kept arriving, SLP had buyers. When they stopped arriving, the only people left were earners who wanted to sell, and the token did exactly what you'd expect. Nobody was playing for fun; that was the flaw, and it's a flaw every play-to-earn design has to solve.

The newer pitch is "play and earn": make the game worth playing without rewards, then add ownership on top. It's a better idea. Whether any token-first studio can actually pull it off is still open, and I'd judge each game on its player counts rather than its whitepaper.

If you're checking whether a game's rewards ever covered what it cost to start, a free crypto profit calculator with the entry cost and fees filled in is more honest than any earnings screenshot posted to Discord.

Gaming tokens on this chart, sorted by what they're attached to

The gaming crypto coins here fall into three rough groups: tokens of a single game, tokens of a gaming chain or platform, and metaverse land economies. They move differently, so it helps to know which is which.

Platform tokens like IMX and RON tend to hold up better than single-game tokens, since one flop doesn't sink them. IMX is also counted among the layer 2 coins because Immutable's chains settle to Ethereum, so it shows up on both pages. Beam went the other way, launching its own chain, which puts it closer to the layer 1 protocols even though almost nobody would call it that.

This gaming tokens list comes from CoinGecko's gaming tag, which is broad. It picks up small tokens from games that never shipped, and a handful of gambling-adjacent tokens that belong to a different conversation entirely. The smallest bubbles here are the ones to treat with the most suspicion. Most of them trade mainly on decentralized exchanges, so their liquidity is thinner than the bubble size suggests; the page on dex tokens explains how those markets work.

Metaverse crypto, four years after Facebook became Meta

On October 28, 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta, and within days MANA and SAND had multiplied in price. Virtual land became a real market for a few months: a plot in The Sandbox next to Snoop Dogg's sold for about $450,000 that December. The metaverse crypto trade was the purest hype cycle in this category, and the crypto fear and greed index sat in greed for most of it, which in hindsight was the signal.

Land prices and user numbers fell hard through 2022, and MANA and SAND now trade at a small fraction of those peaks. The worlds still exist. The crowds mostly don't.

I have an unreasonable soft spot for CryptoKitties, the 2017 game where you bred cartoon cats as NFTs. In December 2017 it was popular enough to clog Ethereum, and one kitty sold for 600 ETH the following year. No defensible reason for the fondness. It just feels like the honest ancestor of everything on this page, before anyone promised it would be a job.

Web3 gaming that people play for the game

The web3 games with real players tend to hide the crypto. Pixels, a farming game on Ronin, reached hundreds of thousands of daily players in early 2024, and most of them were there for the game loop rather than the token. That's the pattern worth watching. Wallets get created in the background, and the token doesn't come up in the first hour of play.

Distribution is still the hard part. Steam banned games with NFTs and crypto in October 2021, and I believe that rule still stands, while Epic said it would allow them. So most web3 gaming lives on its own launchers and chain-specific stores, which is a real handicap for finding players who don't already hold crypto.

Security has been the other handicap. Ronin, the chain behind Axie, ran with just nine validators in March 2022 and attackers got control of five of them, draining about $625 million in one of the largest crypto hacks ever. The chain has since moved to a larger delegated proof of stake validator set. Gaming chains tend to trade decentralization for speed, and that trade has a price.

Where to look besides this chart

For player numbers, DappRadar's game rankings are the place to start; they track active wallets per game and per chain, and they're more useful for judging a gaming token than any price chart. CoinGecko's gaming category lists more tokens than fit comfortably here.

What this page does well is show the sector's mood. When gaming tokens all turn green together while altcoin bubbles elsewhere on the home page stay flat, it's usually a narrative rotation (a big game launch or an exchange listing), and those rarely last longer than a few weeks. When you want to see whether a gaming token's run is outpacing its risk, a cryptocurrency investment comparison against Bitcoin over 1Y shows volatility and correlation side by side.

So is play-to-earn dead?

Axie Infinity isn't dead. It still runs and still has players, while Sky Mavis keeps adding modes and pulling other games onto Ronin. What died was the version where tens of thousands of people treated a game token as a salary. That model needed endless new money, and endless new money doesn't exist.

The gaming tokens with a future are the ones where the game would survive if the token disappeared tomorrow. Before buying any bubble on this page, try that thought experiment on it. For most of them, the answer is uncomfortable. For a few, it isn't, and those are the ones worth watching.