A look at the disastrous 2022 for NFT-based games, after interest from EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, Niantic, and others, as the community grew more niche and scam-filled
Ryan Broderick / Polygon : Tweets: @markpeak Tweets: @markpeak : The idea being that non-fungible tokens would replace everything from loot boxes to character skins to even characters themselves. But none of that ended up happening. https://www.polygon.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs from speculation to retreat. In March 2021, the millions spent on in-game “land” NFTs framed tokens as a new asset class inside games — rentable, sellable, ownable. By early 2022 the floor was cracking: gamers pushed back on NFTs as an extraction mechanism rather than a feature (gamer backlash coverage), and marketplace Cent halted transactions over minted content sellers didn't own.
The Polygon piece closes that loop for the year: the disastrous 2022 for NFT-based games left the community niche and scam-filled, and the plans from EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, and Niantic to replace loot boxes, skins, even characters with tokens never shipped. That failure wasn't a surprise internally — developers at those same studios had already described turmoil over executive-level crypto pushes back in March.
First-order effects
- EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, and Niantic are left holding announced-but-unshipped NFT initiatives, with internal developer opposition documented months before the market itself turned.
Second-order effects
- Ubisoft's continued fad-chasing becomes a compounding liability: by early 2024 insiders tie its NFT detour into a broader pattern of delays and low player numbers feeding layoff fears (Ubisoft's mounting problems).
Third-order effects
- The loot-box-to-NFT substitution thesis dies as a mainstream pitch: publishers lose the argument that tokenized items are a player benefit rather than a monetization layer, pushing any future web3 gaming efforts toward smaller, crypto-native studios instead of AAA publishers.
The trend: Gaming's flirtation with NFTs is collapsing from a publisher-led monetization wave into a niche, scam-ridden subculture, with AAA studios quietly walking back commitments their own developers opposed.