How Play-and-Own Replaced Play-2-Earn as Web3 Gaming’s Greatest Feature

There are certain terms you’ll struggle to encounter in Web3 nowadays, despite them once being ubiquitous. “Metaverse,” for example. Or “algorithmic stablecoin.” And then there’s “Play-to-Earn,” also known as P2E, which was once very much in vogue in Web3 gaming circles. Today, not so much. 

The deprecation of the short-lived P2E moniker is for the best, everyone can agree. Not only did the Play-to-Earn model prove unsustainable, but it misrepresented what Web3 gaming was all about. But while its removal from Web3’s lexicon should be celebrated, the original Play-to-Earn mechanism shouldn’t be hated, for without its fleeting flame, we wouldn’t have reached the point we’re now at, in a blockchain gaming sector powered by Play-and-Own.

How It Started

As history will show, the “Play” part of Play-to-Earn was bang on. It’s just the remaining two-thirds of the term that were way out of whack. To be fair to Web3 developers, they didn’t know that the P2E model would prove unsustainable. And now that they do, most of them have moved on to more sustainable models that aren't defined by token economies. Back in the beginning, tokens were the game. Now, they’re merely the icing on top – a complement to the underlying gameplay and all the other cool stuff that Web3 provides, like the ability to own the assets you earn. 

We’ll get to asset ownership shortly, but first, let’s take a moment to recall how it all began. The P2E model began gaining traction around 2018 as players – or rather, speculators, – caught on to the upside of being early to the Web3 games that were emerging. Web3 studios, like all Web3 projects, needed to attract users and so they resorted to the growth hack that many crypto startups have used: issuing a token. Rather than being launched through a TGE or some other public sale mechanism, studios opted to make the bulk of their tokens earnable in-game. 

This solved a couple of problems. Firstly, it relieved studios of the messy token launch process, with all the legal ramifications and regulatory risks. And secondly, it provided a strong incentive for users to begin playing the game in order to earn tokens. Only they weren’t really playing it: they were farming it at the expense of later arrivals, who entered the game too late to derive anything from the Earn part. Which left just the Play part, which, unfortunately, wasn’t much fun. 

Launched in 2018 by Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity became the poster child for P2E gaming. Built on the Ethereum blockchain before migrating to its own Ronin chain, Axie revolves around breeding and battling cute creatures that are represented as NFTs. Players earn two tokens: Smooth Love Potion (SLP), used for breeding Axies, and Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), the governance token that lets players vote on game decisions and access a community treasury. 

What happened next is well-documented, so we’ll keep this bit brief:  Axie Infinity exploded in popularity, particularly in developing countries like the Philippines, where 40% of its players were based. Daily active users (DAUs) surged from 16,000 in January 2021 to 800,000 by July and peaked at nearly two million later that year. Axie was a huge success, but there was one major problem: players were only playing it for profit, and once the token price cratered, DAUs dropped off a cliff. Axie wasn’t a bad game – in fact it’s still going strong in 2025, having found a new lease of life – but its tokenomics were flawed. 

The rise and fall of Axie Infinity mirrored the rise and fall of Play-to-Earn. Five years on, the industry is much wiser, and no serious studio is trying to push the failed P2E model. Instead, the focus is on either Play-and-Earn – a subtle difference, but one in which token rewards are a bonus rather than the main event – or Play-and-Own, which is arguably the model that should have been followed from day one.

How It’s Going

Today, Web3 gaming is thriving with dedicated gaming chains, hundreds of full-time studios, and thousands of games, ranging from the basic to the highly sophisticated – we’re talking AAA, high production values, immersive worlds, and everything else that could conceivably be crammed into a game. While the quality of the games released under the Web3 banner has improved immeasurably, to get there, developers have had to go back to square one by remembering the primary reason why Web3 gaming was billed as such a big deal to begin with. 

The Web3 studios that are currently making waves – and by “waves” read: putting out games that people actually want to play – are focused on true asset ownership rather than earner-ship. They want gamers to be able to own what’s rightfully theirs, but not primarily for its resale value to some other player or speculator. Rather, they’re intent on showing that where the video gaming industry has gone wrong, Web3 can make it right. 

Take Mythical Games, for example: it’s a Web3 studio through and through, complete with its own blockchain, gaming ecosystem, and native token in the form of MYTH. Yet what’s Mythical famous for? Games. NFL Rivals, especially, which requires no blockchain knowledge to play or token to access: you just pick up your phone and start playing ball. If you wanna go deeper, and start trading football stars on the built-in NFT marketplace, you can, but that’s merely a side event – the game is the main event. 

Not only is this a formula that makes sense, but it’s one that resonates with players, six million of whom have downloaded NFL Rivals. Forthcoming follow-up FIFA Rivals is about to do the same for soccer, while Pudgy Penguins' game, Pudgy Party, together with the current release, Blankos Block Party, will do likewise for platformers. Mythical’s games are designed to be fun independently of financial rewards, addressing the core flaw of P2E. 

It’s by no means the only Web3 games developer pursuing this angle in which entertainment and ownership are prioritized over the bells and whistles of tokenization and earning rewards. Immutable is another example of the form Web3 gaming has now assumed. Anyone can deploy their own game on its Immutable X chain – or its zkEVM sibling – and in theory, they can make it Play-to-Earn if they want, but the appetite for P2E no longer exists. The world has moved on. 

Instead, players can blow each other to bits in Badmad Robots, or fight epic battles against almighty deities in Gods Unchained. Sounds kinda fun, doesn’t it? Sounds like the sorta games you might actually want to play regardless of whether there’s a token reward being dangled for clearing a level. When it came to extending the Bored Apes IP by creating MMORPG Otherside, Yuga Labs was also shrewd enough to avoid falling into the P2E trap. Big studios don’t do Play-to-Earn. Not anymore.

Earn If You Want To

What’s noteworthy about the games cited above is that there are opportunities to earn rewards in all of them. If you’d rather grind it out for monetary reasons rather than the enjoyment of conquering your enemies and climbing the leaderboard, go ahead. It might not be much fun, and it probably won’t be especially profitable, but if you’d rather do that, Play-and-Own still lets you earn. 

But what it really does well is let you own the things that matter to you most. And if you’re a hardcore gamer, that means the armor you win for completing a level, the accessories you earn for topping a leaderboard, and the loot chest you unlock for winning a tournament. If these things matter to you, you should have the right to own them until the end of time, or trade them, or use them as collateral to take out a loan if they’re particularly valuable. Play-and-Own lets you do all that and a whole lot more. That’s why it’s the future of Web3 gaming.