- Play-to-Own could soon replace the Play-to-earn model that struggled to retain players long-term
- ZKcandy launched its mainnet L2 last week, featuring eight games and nearly 2.5 million registered wallets.
- Web3 gaming titles are increasingly offering crypto and NFTs as optional features rather than foundational components.
Web3 gaming is undergoing a transformation that could leave behind the promises of crypto rewards, incentives, and NFTs. Instead, the focus may shift toward creating an ecosystem centered on gamers, not technology.
CCN spoke with ZKcandy CEO Kin Wai Lau to learn more about this new era in Web3 gaming.
Play-to-Earn Is Done
Early iterations of Web3 games tried to combine crypto’s speculative hype with gaming experiences that incentivized players through various crypto reward mechanisms and token airdrops.
Hamster Kombat somewhat revived the Web3 gaming scene with its Telegram-based P2E experience, only to face one of crypto history’s most disappointing airdrop rollouts. However, according to Lau, the play-to-earn (P2E) model is fading.
“Play-to-earn is done. It has become obsolete. It has brought short-term profits to those who wanted them, but that’s not how you build gaming products. Games are made for fun, not earning. Earning has never been a primary goal for players in the broader gaming industry, so P2E was a temporary phenomenon,” Lau explains.
The Web3 gaming industry, Lau argues, made the mistake of leading with technology as the main draw, often overpromising and underdelivering.
Lau believes the future of Web3 gaming lies in a Play-to-Own model, where players genuinely own their in-game assets and can transfer them across interoperable gaming ecosystems.
Titles like Gunzilla’s Off The Grid—available on PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC—are already moving toward this model. Off The Grid integrates Web3 features like crypto and NFTs as optional elements, meaning players don’t need blockchain knowledge to play.
On NFTs
Arguably, the “Play-to-Own” concept was the leading motive behind introducing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as in-game assets, as they offered true ownership over unique digital assets.
Lau explains that he doesn’t think NFTs drew criticism because the technology was bad; it was more a problem of cost and scalability, not to mention the fact that they were rarely, if ever, usable in other Web3 gaming titles or experiences.
The CEO adds that ZKcandy’s NFTs are integrated into the game’s mechanics, retaining ownership while minimizing cost, pointing to how account abstraction and sponsored transactions have dramatically reduced fees.
Lau acknowledges that Axie Infinity pioneered this concept with its Pokémon-like NFT title. For a brief moment, it was highly profitable. However, NFTs in gaming have since fallen out of favor.
“The NFT boom came around before massive scalability efforts, so fees were too high; the blockchain wallet UX complexities were still around. But more importantly, it was unclear what it was all about — many titles incorporated NFTs just for the sake of it, facing an understandable backlash from gamers,” Lau noted.
NFTs were seemingly plugged into any game just for the sake of it, which often prompted backlash from gamers who had deemed the NFT branding as a sign that the game wouldn’t be good, nor would it last.
It was seen as a cheap, lazy cash grab, and as Lau notes, prioritizing technology and novelty over gameplay “is not the way to go.”
“Making a popular title means creating engaging gameplay, and if some tech is inside, you need to make sure it supports users, not creates complications,” he added.
Lau highlights that the P2E model, and “blockchain complexities”, NFT burnout, and other factors, have eroded and undermined trust in the potential of Web3.
Now, it is time to build games for gamers and keep all the technology hidden away “under the hood,” as Lau puts it, making the tech invisible to the user.
AI in Web3 Gaming
Moving ahead, ZKcandy has noted that it’ll be leveraging AI in several ways that’ll both streamline its gaming production and bring new novel innovations to its gaming experiences. Lau explains:
“We’re including AI in our operations step by step. Right now, our developers use it as an assistant that helps them take a fresh look, a view from the side of their work, so they can find a way to improve and correct some nuances they might have missed. At this point, AI is a helper, not something that replaces the talent of our people.”
ZKcandy is in partnership with iCandy, the largest game developer in Southeast Asia. Its portfolio includes well over 500 games, including AAA titles such as Starcraft Remastered, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us.
This gives ZKcandy unique access to some of the industry’s greatest IPs and talent, but can they capture mainstream interest?
“We’re just starting. AAA titles take a few years to develop, so the funding that poured into the industry in the 2020s is only going to start paying off. Take account abstraction, which drastically simplified user onboarding for Web3 games: it only popped up massively a year or two ago. It’s too early to judge. Let’s wait a few years and then see how it goes.”
For now, ZKcandy remains focused on mobile gaming as Lau believes it’s the best way to bring entertainment to “as many gamers as possible.”
