🧠 TL;DR:
Web3 gaming was pitched as the future: own your gear, earn while playing, and carry your identity across games. But behind the promises were missing fundamentals. We sold a vision before the tech—and expectations are still catching up. This is part 1 of my series: not a dunk, not nostalgia—just the truth.
The Dream That Got Me In
I didn’t enter Web3 gaming for the hype. I joined because I genuinely believed this was where gaming was going next.
Own your in-game items
Trade them freely
Make money while playing
That hit home. Especially after getting banned as a kid for buying WoW gold.
Now? I care about digital agency the way I care about owning a home or growing a career.
It wasn’t just a new platform—it was a new philosophy:
➡ Games that respected your time
➡ Proof of achievement on-chain
➡ Player-driven economies
I believed. So did a lot of us.
🚀 Phase 1: Belief
Early Web3 gaming had a mission: Players aren’t just consumers—they’re stakeholders.
The big promises:
Ownership: Your items, your wallet
Interoperability: Bring assets across worlds
Fair economies: Everyone contributes, everyone earns
But we overlooked key questions:
🧩 What does “ownership” actually mean?
🔌 Can interop even work technically or creatively?
⚖️ How do you design an open economy?
Spoiler: We weren’t ready. And I helped sell that dream anyway.
📜 The Receipt Problem
You own the asset, right? It’s on-chain, in your wallet.
But in most cases—it’s just a pointer.
A receipt.
Hosted on AWS. Rendered in Unity. Stored in a dev’s database.
So you don’t own the sword. You own the claim.
That only works if someone chooses to honor it.
🪙 Scarcity ≠ Value
Web3’s big unlock was digital scarcity.
“This sword is rare.”
“This land is capped.”
“This horse can’t be cloned.”
But scarcity without meaning = speculation.
🧱 Land sold before games were built
🐴 Horses bred before players joined
🎭 Skins and NFTs dumped with no real use
As Lars Doucet said:
“Many games confused artificial scarcity for innovation.”
⚔ Interoperability Was Never the Real Dream
“Use your sword in any game.”
“Bring your avatar across worlds.”
That sounds dope—but it’s a creative and technical nightmare.
What Web3 actually gives us is something else:
Proof of ownership
On-chain signals of value
A shared reputation layer
That’s still powerful. But it wasn’t what most people were sold.
📉 Fair Economies Weren’t Fair… or Fun
Web3 promised “fair player economies.”
But launching a token ≠ balancing an economy.
And no one warned us we’d have to become part-time macro economists.
Tokens with no burn
Rewards with no demand
Incentives with no fun
Play-to-earn turned into pay-to-bleed.
⛓ The Culture of “Forever Utility”
Web3 launched promises, not products.
“Passive yield”
“Lifetime access”
“Playable NFTs”
“Value accrual”
Retail didn’t act like investors—they acted like customers.
“I bought the mint. Why are you charging me again?”
And suddenly, devs weren’t building—they were managing expectation debt.
This split between VC-level upside and customer-level expectations still haunts the space.
What We Got Right 🔍
Despite all that? Some things still ring true:
Players do want ownership—it just has to feel real.
On-chain proof will matter more in an AI world.
The people are passionate, and the experiments are worth it.
The real miss?
We tried to make blockchain compete with graphics and gameplay.
It should’ve been paired with servers, databases, and authentication.
Not game loops.
Why I’m Still Here
A lot of people left. I thought about it too.
But I stayed.
Because I believe Web3 gaming isn’t dead—it just hasn’t found its voice yet.
This is the first piece in a new series.
Not a victory lap. Not a rug pull post-mortem.
A record.
Up Next
In the next post, I’ll walk through:
How curiosity turned into conviction
How conviction turned into extraction
Why “gaming for airdrops” became the dominant loop
And what that shift means for builders today
If you’ve ever felt burned, inspired, disillusioned, or driven by this space—stick around.
We’re just getting started. 🤙
-Cody