Are NFT games dead?

Simon · Chief Gaming Officer
Covering blockchain games since 2022

NFT games as a get-rich trend are dead, and most of the projects from that era are gone. NFT games as a category are still here: in our own library of 100 games, 56 are live or in early access and 35 have ended. The ones that remain tend to be games first, with big names such as MapleStory N and MIR4 among them.

Why people say NFT games are dead

The numbers behind that claim are real. Market maker Caladan estimated that about 93% of Web3 game projects are effectively dead, with token values down about 95% from their 2022 peaks and studio funding down 93% by 2025 (April 2026). DappRadar counts more than 300 blockchain games that have shut down. Axie Infinity, the face of the boom, fell from about 2.7 million daily users at its peak to about 5,500.

The closures keep coming too. Ubisoft shut down Champions Tactics (October 30, 2026), Pudgy Party closed (June 2026) and Fishing Frenzy ended (June 25, 2026).

Most of those games had the same weakness. They sold tokens and promised income first, and players left as soon as the income dried up. We were writing about these games through the boom and the crash, and that pattern repeated so often that it stopped being a surprise.

Are any NFT games still worth playing?

Yes, and they look different from the 2021 wave. Here is what our status checks show across the 100 games we track.

56 are live or in early access, 12 of them quiet enough that we recheck them every quarter
4 are still in development
5 are still running but dropped their NFTs
35 have ended

That library is a selection, because we add games that are alive, so read it as a picture of what is worth checking and keep Caladan’s figure as the market view. A 35% failure rate in a hand-picked list still says a lot about this genre.

The survivors include real audiences. MIR4 averages more than 10,000 concurrent players a month on Steam alone. MapleStory Universe, home of MapleStory N, took about $9.9 million in protocol revenue in the first half of 2026, and Night Crows reports 14 million users across its versions. DappRadar still counts about 4.9 million daily gaming wallets (July 2026), though a wallet is not a player and some of those are bots.

What changed in the games that survived

The games still standing mostly treat blockchain as an optional layer. You can start for free, you often need no wallet, and items only become tradable when you choose that. FIFA Rivals, Off The Grid and Pixels all let you play first. Big publishers such as Wemade and Nexon keep building here, while Ubisoft has closed one blockchain game and still runs another.

The bigger risk now is picking a game that quietly stops. Before you spend money, check for recent updates, activity on the official X account and a live player count. Our guide on how to choose NFT games walks through what to look for, and our NFT games library only lists games we track as still running.