The Future of GameFi: Perspective from WarSpore · Saga
In the blockchain space, GameFi was once seen as the next explosive trend, but the transition through the last bull-bear cycle exposed its inherent fragility. Take Axie Infinity as an example: this project once swept the globe, with users breeding virtual pets to earn tokens. What appeared to be an innovative gaming model was, in reality, closer to a financial casino — players invested capital not primarily for immersive entertainment, but in anticipation of high returns promised by the “Play to Earn” mechanism. In bull markets, communities thrived and prices soared; when the bear market arrived, users fled in droves and project value collapsed dramatically.
This experience led me, during the development of WarSpore · Saga (hereafter referred to as Saga), to repeatedly reflect on the true nature of GameFi: must it remain merely a speculation tool, or is there a way to build it into a form of entertainment that delivers lasting value?
The prosperity of traditional GameFi has often been built on market bubbles, and the strong cyclical nature of blockchain ensures that such bubbles will inevitably burst. Only by shifting to content-value-driven models — making players genuinely willing to pay for the gaming experience — can GameFi develop the resilience to survive market cycles. Therefore, Saga is not abstract theory; it aims both to validate the infrastructure potential of Nervos CKB and to outline a gradual, replicable evolutionary path for the industry — from finance-dominated to content co-creation.
Inheriting Tradition as a Bridge
The core gameplay of traditional GameFi typically revolves around PVE and PVP — modes that were thoroughly battle-tested during the previous GameFi cycle. Although their economic models ultimately collapsed, the market had already widely accepted this product form: PVE involves players interacting with the environment to gather resources, while PVP designs direct player-versus-player competition for resource allocation.
These designs precisely match the speculative psychology of blockchain users: players hold tokens like casino chips, pursuing profits through gamified competition. Financial logic dominates everything, while gameplay is marginalized. Many GameFi projects are essentially just variants of DeFi.
This model is difficult to sustain long-term for two main reasons:
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It is highly dependent on external market sentiment. In bull markets, rising token prices attract hordes of speculators, creating illusory prosperity. But when the bear market hits, projects lacking intrinsic fun collapse rapidly — users will not stay simply because the game is “fun.”
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The bubble nature itself determines unsustainability. In cases like Axie, early users profited through token arbitrage, but late entrants faced inflation and crash risks. The entire ecosystem was built on sand, and blockchain’s strong cyclicality only amplifies these problems, causing bubbles to burst with every bull-bear transition.
Despite this, completely abandoning PVE and PVP would be unwise. There are practical reasons to inherit these modes: blockchain users are naturally speculation-oriented; they are more receptive to “casino-like” mechanics and many are drawn precisely by that thrill. If one were to abruptly launch a purely gameplay-oriented GameFi project, it would face enormous risks — high user education costs, long adaptation periods, and likely failure before market validation.
True innovation requires gradual accumulation: starting from what users already know, slowly injecting new elements, lowering barriers while progressively guiding changes in user behavior and habits.
Saga is designed precisely along these lines. While its PVE and PVP retain the low learning threshold of traditional GameFi modes and achieve a relative balance between gameplay and financial incentives, an optimized casino remains a casino at its core. Only by decentralizing the right to create game content can GameFi truly be guided into an era that survives bull and bear markets.
From Zero-Sum Games to Value Co-Creation
The root cause of traditional GameFi’s bias toward “casino” models lies in the extremely high cost of developing high-quality game content. To iterate quickly and launch, project teams often choose low-barrier financial competition designs that let players use tokens as chips to compete against each other. This approach easily generates hype in bull markets but completely overlooks the core driver of gaming — a rich content ecosystem.
Without content as an anchor, GameFi struggles to retain users in bear markets, because players pay only in hopes of future high returns, not out of genuine recognition of the experience. To enable GameFi to cross cycles, the incentive mechanism must be reshaped: the financial aspect shifts from zero-sum competition to value distribution; players evolve from financial speculators into value producers and content consumers.
UGC (User-Generated Content) is precisely the key direction for this transformation. It breaks the limitations of traditional models by decentralizing content creation to the community: players stake game tokens to create “Chronicle Fragments” — NFT-based text snippets that are not isolated elements, but can interconnect and collectively build the game’s world view, even extending narratives from previous works.
This design transforms players from pure competitors into co-creators collaborating with developers. Project teams reward users who contribute high-quality content with a share of the game’s generated revenue. From this point on, the motivation for players to pay undergoes a fundamental change: they no longer pay in hopes of high returns, but are genuinely willing to pay for the game experience itself.
The benefits of this model are obvious. It directly reduces the content production burden on project teams. In traditional games, developers must continually release updates or events to maintain vitality, easily falling into resource exhaustion. UGC harnesses the collective intelligence of the community, creating unlimited expansion possibilities while strengthening players’ sense of belonging — game content is no longer top-down handouts, but collectively built achievements.
Compared to the emptiness of traditional casinos, UGC allows GameFi to return to the essence of entertainment: payment is for immersive experience, not blind trend-following gambling.
Content Studios
Once the UGC model gradually becomes widespread, it will inevitably trigger profound changes in the GameFi ecosystem. The “gold-farming studios” of traditional GameFi are very likely to transform — through UGC tools — into genuine content producers for the game.
This represents a complete paradigm shift: game players can become content creators at any time using UGC tools, sharing game revenue with the development team behind them. GameFi players will no longer stand as counterparties in opposition to developers; instead, they will co-create, share benefits, and achieve mutual win-win outcomes. This is the true future path for GameFi.
Saga’s collaborative narrative module foreshadows the potential of this underlying transformation. Although it does not yet involve collaborative co-creation of core gameplay (with limited upside), it is easy to implement, sufficiently independent, and highly fault-tolerant. I believe starting with game background lore as co-created content is a worthwhile experimental step on the road to this paradigm shift.
In the long run, the rise of UGC-style GameFi can reshape the entire industry landscape: moving away from small-scale casino models toward community-driven platforms similar to Roblox, where user participation shifts from passive consumption to active contribution.
Overall, the introduction of the UGC model extends Saga’s vision and highlights its value as the first fully on-chain game in the BTC ecosystem — not only addressing the low gameplay quality issues facing current GameFi, but also pointing the direction for the future development of the GameFi ecosystem.
Conclusion
Facing the flaws of traditional GameFi models, we do not need to completely overthrow them; rather, we should treat them as the starting point for industry development and innovation. Because meaningful innovation must respect market reality — rash, large leaps often come with extremely high trial-and-error costs. Only by gradually guiding speculation-oriented users toward paying for content value can the GameFi industry truly progress.
WarSpore · Saga is my practical exploration of this development path. It will demonstrate the feasibility and potential of fully implementing on-chain technology on CKB, and it extends an invitation to the entire community: the future of GameFi does not lie in the fleeting noise before bubbles burst, but in the enduring light of collaborative content creation.
结论：强资产所有权 = 弱游戏变现能力
：“Web3 Gaming Didn’t Meet Expectations. Rewarded Play Will.” / X