One of the biggest challenges in the crypto space has always been convincing users to shift from the web2 economy to web3.
🟠 Web2 – You make payments with a credit card, and in-game items belong to the developers.
🟠 Web3 – You pay with crypto from your wallet, and all in-game items belong to you personally in the form of NFTs.
💬 During the 2020-2021 cycle, the groundwork was laid for a massive wave of crypto games, featuring NFT ownership and the use of project tokens as the primary currency.
Players could only obtain in-game items and upgrades using project tokens, causing the token values to skyrocket by thousands of percent.
❓ So what went wrong with modern tap games?
There is no real utility for the tokens. The only use case is to sell them on an exchange after mindlessly tapping your screen.
🔴 Right now, every tap game follows a centralized web2 process where users earn game tokens that can be converted into web3 crypto. But after that, players don’t know what to do with the tokens other than selling them on an exchange.
📉 As a result, we see the same pattern—tap game tokens continuously lose value because they lack real-world utility.
No use case = no reason to buy.
🪙 The second issue is that it's impossible to distribute large amounts of money to a vast number of users, leaving most players with mere pennies.
❗️The third issue is that most projects are built as web2 games with web3 mechanics awkwardly tacked on, often limited to simple transactions or token withdrawals on-chain.
While many projects with tens of millions of users hit the market, only Notcoin managed to give their token any real use.
🔴 This is why tap games succeeded in attracting users as web2 projects but completely failed as web3 initiatives. They died even before proper app development was completed.
So, will games ever fully embrace this new economy? They might, but timing is everything.
📊 The peak engagement period has already passed. We are now in a phase of disappointment and project abandonment, meaning the chance to fully realize the potential has been lost.
What could have been a great web3 transition story was cut short by developer greed, leaving us with simple projects wrapped in shiny crypto packaging.
