Receding
Metaverse & blockchain gaming hype
You will hit mountains of 2021 to 2022 coverage presenting the metaverse as the future, but it's dated intel. The surviving ideas migrated to other places, games, and platforms.
What was play-to-earn?
“Play-to-earn” was the idea that in-game items could be crypto tokens, so playing a game could actually earn you money. “The metaverse” was the idea of one big shared online world you could carry yourself across different games. Both were as much pitches to investors as they were real products.
Live in
- Global
Where it stands
The 2021 to 2022 wave of metaverse platforms and NFT/play-to-earn games has largely collapsed or rebranded. Matthew Ball's retrospective analysis groups web3 among growth engines that failed to deliver on their hype, leaving the industry stalled. Persistent worlds and UGC ideas have survived inside Roblox/Fortnite, but the token economics mostly did not. The exceptions are publisher-backed: Nexon's NEXPACE reported 30.98 million NXPC of first-half 2026 protocol revenue from MapleStory Universe, a running token economy inside a live IP.
Further reading
The timeline, consequences and objections for this trend are not written yet. What it is and its reading list are above.