What determines if a crypto game has staying power? The knee-jerk answer might be ‘incentives’, but there is so much more that goes into a compelling gaming experience which ultimately makes people care and stick around. These factors range from design aesthetics, storytelling, gameplay mechanics, barriers to entry, and much more. Indeed, incentives can be a piece of the equation, but they are not the sole determining factor. If you want to understand which games are the most sustainable, then your best bet is to understand which are the most enjoyable to play.

But playing a bunch of crypto games might sound like a lot of effort – that’s where we come in. We played the games so you don’t have to. With the factors mentioned above in mind, we set out to evaluate a select group of existing crypto games. Join us as we dive in and examine Pegaxy, Thetan Arena, and Crabada through the eyes of the average gamer.

A Note on Methodology

To simplify the process of searching for games, I used PlayCore.io. Here I perused the data from each game (mainly looking for activity) and then cross-referenced this data with their social activity. To minimize (but sadly not eradicate) the effect of botting, I compared the active Discord members to the total and also compared the unique wallet addresses of token holders through their governance and earn tokens. The results of this can be seen below.Bigger games like Axie greatly skewed the data so we removed them to increase the visual ‘signal to noise’ on the rest. From this list, I selected Pegaxy, Thetan Arena, and Crabada. In future editions, we’d like to revisit the other games shown above as well.

The criteria I used to examine these games were:

Elevator Pitch: A brief description of the game
Accessibility: What is the initial user experience? Is this game easy to access? Is there a custom launcher? Do I need to bridge assets in order to play? Is it free? If not, then what is the cost?
Gameplay: Most games have simple hooks. These hooks fall into 3 categories – Visual, Mechanical, and Narrative. I scored each game from 1-10 across these categories. For context, a game that scores highly in all three of those categories would be Witcher 3. Since the majority of P2E games are mobile, I adjusted the scoring accordingly (however, you can play them all on PC).
Data: How much time did I spend playing, and how much did I earn? With greater time invested, could this be a profitable endeavor?
Verdict: The sum of my personal experience with the game and the ranking of 5 metrics derived from the above criteria. Specifically: i)P2W, ii) Cost, iii) Friction, iv) UI/UX, v) Comm