Solana Foundation President Lily Liu: Gaming on a blockchain is not coming back

According to Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, gaming on a blockchain is not coming back. Liu made her prediction following Meta’s recent admission that its metaverse project was a total failure in adoption. 

Lily Liu panned all efforts to bring on-chain and play-to-earn gaming back. On X, she compared blockchain games to the now-frozen metaverse built by Meta. 

The Solana community was less certain about the fate of on-chain gaming. Teams are still building on Solana, and the chain reports 88 live games. The network also offers tools to build more games and manage their assets. 

On-chain gaming erased value after the initial hype

Play-to-earn was one of the major trends driving the 2021 crypto bull market. Currently, surviving tokens are valued at $2.12B and see limited activity. Most of the value is concentrated in FLOKI and SAND, while former stars like Axie Infinity (AXS) have fallen to new lows. Gaming tokens trade on inertia and legacy listings, though some projects tried to pivot into DeFi. 

On-chain gaming also launched its own metaverse apps, such as the Sandbox and Decentraland, which include land plot NFTs. Those projects also lost value, often wiping out millions of dollars. Other games offered overpriced NFT collections, promising higher returns for their owners. 

The biggest flaw of on-chain games was that they paid out rewards by minting new tokens, which meant the native assets were guaranteed to crash. Despite this, on-chain gaming expanded crypto adoption and laid some of the foundations for Web3 apps. 

Is Solana gaming over?

Solana is one of the cheapest networks to use for regular transactions. The platform has been used for NFT and meme tokens, which obscured the gaming sector. 

Despite this, some games remain active on Solana and maintain a social media presence. Users still warn about game projects that over-promise and never ship a product. 

Gaming is still possible on all chains, and infrastructure has improved since 2021. For the early games, users had to manage wallets, pay for gas, and buy tokens. Currently, games allow free access and optional ownership of items or tokens. Seamless, invisible wallets and account abstraction are also helping make on-chain games easier to get started. 

One of the goals of Solana was also to offer speed and low fees, in order to tap the gaming market as one of its use cases. Additionally, games can only put the account and ownership on the blockchain, without the need for rewards or other GameFi elements.

Other networks also show gaming is a valid use case. TON is still hosting games, and recently Gamee was acquired by Nasdaq-listed AlphaTON (ATON) to drive adoption.