Play-to-Earn and Crypto Gaming Coins: Why I Avoid Them

I don't invest in play-to-earn games or crypto gaming tokens, and I don't plan to again. I lost real money on one of them, Gods Unchained (GU), and that experience changed how I look at the whole category. Play-to-earn sold the idea that you could play a game and get paid for it. What I saw from the inside was a short window, usually right after launch or during a token pump, when playing was lucrative. Once more players arrived and the token price fell, the earning was gone, and the people who got in late were the ones left holding the bag.

If you are wondering whether these games are worth your money, my short answer is no. Most of them are not really on the blockchain. The tokens and NFTs are on-chain, but the game itself usually runs on centralized servers, so the promise of real ownership does not hold up when developers can change the NFTs whenever they want. Many teams can also fake a game convincingly by starting with free Unreal Engine assets and customizing them a little. I came to see that as a pattern across the whole category, not a one-off problem with a single project.

My thinking developed over two posts. The first is Why I'll Never Invest in Crypto Gaming Coins, published August 1, 2024. I wrote it after losing thousands of dollars on GU, a game that had sponsored two of my Twitch streams. I had bought a lot of the GODS token at around a dollar. My main point then was about research: I had played the game and still got ripped off, so if you are not doing at least that much, you have no business buying the token. I also argued about opportunity cost, since I had put tens of thousands of hours into video games and had earned over $100,000 as a professional gamer in 2021.

The second is How Play To Earn Gaming Fooled Me, dated October 30, 2025. It is an excerpt from my memoir and tells the GU story in more detail. In the summer of 2022 GU offered me $200 to play it on Twitch for an hour. In October 2022 I noticed the game had lots of viewers and few streamers, so I went all in: more than $10,000 in GODS and GU NFTs, a climb to the top mythic division within weeks, and almost a thousand dollars of GODS given away to viewers. Then I realized the game had peaked at launch and the token price was falling because fewer people wanted to play. Almost everyone who bought GODS, including me, lost substantial money. The memoir post also goes beyond games into how exchanges hold customers' coins.

So my view moved from a question of research and time to a question of structure. In 2024 I was warning people to do their homework and to play the game before buying the token. By 2025 I was describing play to earn as a model where early players profit and later players fund them, and where the technology is often thinner than the marketing. Reading the two posts in order shows that shift. The newer one is the more complete account, so it is the first post below, followed by the 2024 post in full.

There is one gaming token I said could be decent in 2024: Dragginz, which I described as planned to be the first fully on-chain MMO on the Internet Computer. I said I was not holding any Dragginz, because the game was not out yet and because I was no longer investing in crypto gaming. That is still the honest position. When I want exposure to a chain I believe in, I hold Internet Computer (ICP) instead. I wrote that I had almost 5,000 ICP, around $40,000 at the time, and that I stake it. If you want to see how I think about coins in general, start with how to research a crypto before you buy, and then read my Internet Computer (ICP) hub. For a broader look at how these losses happen, the crypto scams and airdrop fraud page covers the same pattern from another angle.

What you will find below this opening is the full text of both posts, newest first. Read them as one argument: the games are often not what they claim, the economics tend to reward insiders, and the time you spend playing is a cost most people never count. If you are holding a gaming token right now and want a straight second opinion from me, you can book a personal video review and we can go through it together.

How Play To Earn Gaming Fooled Me

Originally published October 30, 2025.

This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.

God’s Unchained and the Illusion of On-Chain Gaming

Let’s take a crypto game I played and was popular streaming on Twitch as an example of my own ignorance before discovering ICP. In the summer of 2022, after I was canceled and haters promised I would never get another sponsorship, a crypto game called Gods Unchained or GU reached out to me and offered me $200 to try playing their game on Twitch for an hour and upload the video to YouTube. When I initially played GU, it felt a lot like Magic: The Gathering Arena except there were way less players and cards cost way more. After playing once, I mostly forgot about the game and went back to my retro games and Warzone.

In October 2022, I noticed that GU had a lot of viewership on Twitch and not a lot of streamers. I saw my chance to get Twitch partner and went all in on the game. I bought $10,000+ worth of the GODS token and the GU NFTs which I used in game to rank up to the highest mythic division in just a few weeks. After almost two months of streaming Gods Unchained for hours every day and giving away almost a thousand dollars of the GODS token to viewers, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized the game was doomed. GU had peaked when the game first launched, and the price of the GODS token originally was high because the token was new and scarce. The more the price dumped, the fewer people were interested in the game.

While crypto games pushed “Play to Earn” as the future of gaming, I could see from the inside it was another lie. The public loved the idea of just playing a game and earning money. The truth was that there was a limited window, generally right when the game first released or the token price pumped, where playing the game was lucrative. Once more players got on and the price of the token plunged, the play to earn was worthless. Even worse, you generally had to spend a lot of money first to start earning which turned play to earn into another Ponzi scheme where those getting in early made everything and everyone else wasted their time and money.

The technical reality of a game like God’s Unchained is that the token itself is hosted on a layer two which means two different blockchains and at least four times the odds you could lose everything if there’s a problem. My experience was that the second layer-two blockchain felt centrally controlled, and the game itself was hosted on centralized servers, just like the majority of video games. Neither Ethereum as the layer one nor Immutable X as the layer 2 could do much more than sending token transactions and hosting text based NFTs that pointed to images hosted off chain. Elon Musk once joked on Joe Rogan’s show how worthless NFTs are because they are not actually hosted entirely on chain but most of crypto did not seem to get this key point from the richest man in the world.

To play GU, you needed to first sign up using your email address for an account. Once you signed up for an account, you needed to verify your email. Next, you had to have a certain crypto wallet installed using a browser extension. This already connected you to multiple centralized points of failure, where if your email got hacked, you could lose your account, or if your browser or your computer got hacked, you could lose all your crypto and your assets in the game. From there, you had to go to the website and connect the email account with the browser-extension crypto wallet. If you wanted to buy cards in the game, you needed to go to an NFT marketplace that was on another website. To transact there, you had to deposit crypto or pay huge fees buying with a credit card.

When you bought these NFTs on the marketplace and held them to use in the game or to speculate on the price going up, you had the illusion of real ownership for players which matched the GU marketing. Meanwhile, the game developers could change the NFTs anytime they wanted to, and they frequently did make changes that crashed the price or occassionally pumped the price of the cards. If you went to play the actual game with these NFTs and the crypto you bought, at the time you had to download the game onto your computer and then it was played through centralized servers, although today they do have a mobile app too. Finally, you had to match with somebody else and have a real game.

Does any of what I just described sound like a superior user experience to the ease of playing a game on your phone, tablet, console, or PC? The nightmare onboarding process offput most people who tried to get started. On top of the difficultly getting people to play, developing a crypto game like this more expensive than making a non-crypto game which meant that the team generally works only to survive with little thought of long term viability. From the outside, the crypto play to earn narratives and hype often looked attractive to naive crypto investors like me before discovering how ICP is different. Almost everyone, including me, who bought the GODS token lost substantial amounts of money. Meanwhile, the technology on ICP to make a crypto play to earn game a complete technical reality got almost zero coverage across crypto. Learning to see through narratives like play to earn before they cost you is exactly the kind of thing we work through when you book a private call with me and bring it to our call.

Crypto Exchange Fraud

When I really understood the basics of how technical backend works with crypto, I realized what a giant fraud so much of the industry appears to be. Almost all cryptos act as if they are these groundbreaking inventions, when in my experience, most of it is just a Ponzi scheme. The technology is mostly useless, with most transactions happening on some centralized third party’s website.

Here's a worse example than just a crypto game. If you are on a crypto exchange and I deposit my Bitcoin into the exchange, and then you go to buy Bitcoin from that same exchange, nothing actually happens on the Bitcoin blockchain. The only thing that happens on-chain is me sending my Bitcoin into an address controlled by the exchange. After that, the coin often just sits in the exchange’s wallet. While it sits there, the exchange allows it to be bought and sold repeatedly on their own internal system. Nothing else occurs on the blockchain itself unless someone tries to withdraw or the exchange moves it to another wallet.

In theory, this setup would not be a problem if the exchange were always honest. If I deposit crypto, sell it, and then you buy it, then theoretically the crypto is yours. The problem is that many exchanges have been caught being dishonest, and from what I’ve seen, I believe it is very likely that many of them continue to be dishonest today. The only difference is that they haven’t yet gone so far that they collapse completely. If you want to think through how all of this actually affects your own decisions in crypto, you're welcome to set up a call with me and we'll talk it through honestly on our call.

Here’s how simple the fraud can be. Let’s say I deposit one Bitcoin onto an exchange and put up a sell order. The exchange now actually has one Bitcoin in its custody. Then you go to buy that Bitcoin and it appears in your account. If that was all that happened, everything would be fine. The problem is that instead of stopping there, some exchanges will then create another sell order for a second Bitcoin that does not even exist and sell it to someone else. They can do this because none of these trades are happening directly on the blockchain. The trades are only happening on the exchange’s website. The blockchain is not moving the Bitcoin each time, and there is almost no transparency about how much crypto an exchange truly has compared to how much their website claims they have. This has given exchanges, and now potentially ETFs, the ability to sell Bitcoin and other cryptos they don’t actually own.

While selling one extra Bitcoin might not be that bad, what if I put 1 Bitcoin onto an exchange, then you buy it, and nine other people also buy that same 1 Bitcoin. As long as no more than one person withdraws, the fraud goes undetected. The nine others are holding claims to fake Bitcoin that does not exist on the blockchain. Some of the ETFs and custodial accounts today don’t even allow self-custody withdrawals, which creates a perfect setup for fraud given the customers only have the choice to sell back to cash. For the exchanges and ETFs that do allow withdrawals, if too many people start a withdrawal at once, they simply announce that withdrawals are “suspended” and given an arbitrary excuse why. That triggers fear, encourages people to sell, and provides cover to keep manipulating the price.

This cycle allows exchanges and ETFs that are dishonest to stockpile Bitcoin or other cryptos at low prices, pay influencers and push narratives to get people hyped into buying at higher prices, then dump their holdings all at once to crash the market. What happens is people are essentially encouraged to buy fake Bitcoin and altcoins at high prices and then panic-sell at low prices. Exchanges that operate this way can make massive profits from selling crypto they don’t even have. The whole thing, from my perspective, can continue because of widespread ignorance from people that don’t do their own research, they don’t ask hard questions, and they’re only focused on making money. If you do care about the truth in crypto and want to talk with me in person, you can find a time on my calendar at jerrybanfield.com.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

Why I'll Never Invest in Crypto Gaming Coins

From my video published August 1, 2024.

I want to tell you what a dumpster fire investing in crypto gaming is, and give you some better ideas instead. First, why do I absolutely detest investing in crypto games? And have I done it myself? Yes. I've lost thousands of dollars investing in crypto games.

Most crypto games are Web3 theater

The first thing you need to understand in crypto is that almost all the games in crypto are not actually even on the blockchain, aside from tokens and hashes for NFTs. Almost everything else is hosted on centralized computing, which means there's complete decentralization Web3 theater happening in almost all of crypto games. They're basically just the same old games we already have, plus a blockchain token. They're not fully on chain. They don't deliver the promise of a real Web3 game.

But even worse than that, think about what a gigantic waste of time playing video games is. When you combine cryptocurrency projects, which generally have almost no personal responsibility or accountability — where anyone can just create a coin and claim they're building a game — you have levels upon levels of waste here. You have people investing in crypto, where most altcoins are going to go to zero. Then they're investing in games, games that for the most part aren't even on the blockchain, and most video games are an utter flop and failure. And then third, the underlying thing being invested in is people basically wasting their time on a game instead of participating in real life.

The opportunity cost of video games

If I look back at my life, there are two areas where I would love to see what my life looks like without them. One is alcohol. Drinking alcohol is one of the biggest scams out there. It takes and takes and steals from you, takes your life energy, drains the health of your body. How sick is it that people prefer being poisoned by alcohol to facing life sober? As an alcoholic who's sober 10 years now, I know what a scam that is. Alcohol is the worst thing that's ever happened in my life.

And the second worst thing that's ever happened in my life is video games. I played tens of thousands of hours of video games in my life — especially when you combine them with alcohol. I'd love to see all the things I could have done instead. The biggest problem with video games is the opportunity cost. What else could you have done in your life? My God, I could have done so much with the rest of my life besides dumping tens of thousands of hours into getting my Counter-Strike kill-death ratio up to three and winning all these pointless matches.

I even got to be a professional gamer, earning over $100,000 in 2021 and getting to be pretty well known on Facebook Gaming and YouTube. And it all disappeared pretty quickly. Why? Because I got to hate playing video games every day. I got to see how useless video games are. Video games often put you in this competitive me-versus-the-world separate mind state, which is why they go so well with addiction, and why people often mix addictions up with gaming — drinking and smoking a bunch of weed while they play. So do you think investing in that is making a better world? Do you want to bet your returns on people throwing their lives away on a so-called crypto game? This is one reason I've come to see crypto gaming the way I do — it's a lot like the way I think crypto is basically Call of Duty Warzone, and ICP wins.

If you've invested in crypto gaming, to me this is an opportunity to rethink your investment strategy and rethink what kind of world you want to create. Almost everybody who's invested in crypto gaming has lost money, and that's a chance to see the crypto matrix that's ripping you off — to see that anyone can start a crypto gaming project and never actually deliver a game.

How easy it is to fake a game

Most crypto gaming projects have never even released a real game. They literally start a coin up, talk about the game they're making, and put out some videos. Do you realize how easy it is to fake building a real game? There are free resources on Unreal Engine — free assets and little things you can try out and customize. People who really are into the gaming world will see a crypto coin putting out footage from Unreal Engine, basically the free resources with tiny amounts of customization, and they can see how fraudulent it is. There have been big projects called out for being a blatant scam: they took the free Unreal Engine stuff, made minimal customizations, and then talked up the game they were developing. That's how bad crypto gaming is.

So to me, if there's one area you really want to stay away from in crypto investing, it's gaming. And I'd generally suggest that if anyone you're watching is encouraging you to buy gaming tokens, you avoid watching them as well — because if they've never thought about crypto gaming this way, you don't want to take your cues from a content creator who hasn't considered this aspect of it. If you want to see how I think about coins instead, I keep these conversations going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

If you don't even play games, why are you investing?

The ultimate bottom line for crypto gaming investing is this: if you don't even play video games, what are you doing investing in crypto games? So many of you have told me you invest in crypto games and you don't even play video games yourself. That's insane. Anything you're investing in, you should be in the middle of getting to know.

I'd extend this to things like stocks. If you own stock in a company like Walmart or Amazon, I hope you actually shop there, so you can get a feel for what kind of business they really have. The most basic way to do your own research when you invest in crypto is to use whatever it is you're investing in. So if you don't play crypto games, you absolutely should never, ever be investing in crypto games. And even if you do play them, I hope you actually play the game before you buy the token. Because even then, you can still get ripped off.

I did the research on Gods Unchained and still lost

I lost thousands and thousands of dollars buying Gods Unchained. It was one of the most hyped-up, well-funded crypto games, and I bought a lot of it after they actually sponsored two of my live streams on Twitch. I bought a bunch of the GODS token at a dollar. Yeah, that didn't work out well for me. Keep in mind, at the time I was a gaming streamer — it was the main thing I was doing — and I actually played the game itself, and then I bought the token. I still got ripped off doing that amount of research. So if you're not doing at least that much research, you have no business buying the thing to start with.

And this is almost every crypto game: it does nothing but go down. Usually the team and the insiders — the seed investors — have endless tokens to dump, and there's almost no utility to holding the token itself. Many of these crypto games don't even use the token on the marketplace for the NFTs that aren't even hosted on chain. I know this sounds shockingly bad, and you'd wonder how anybody could get ripped off by these. What happens with something like Gods Unchained is what looks to me like very intentional, manipulated pumps: insiders buy a whole bunch of tokens to push the price up, and then proceed to dump as much as possible, which is why the price constantly drops. It pumps up to thirty-something cents and people immediately dump it again. A lot of these tokens are insanely manipulated, and in my opinion absolutely horrible investments. It's one more reason I've come to believe 99% of crypto is theft.

Even if you actually do your own research, it's still easy to get ripped off on these, so I would never buy a crypto gaming token unless you actually play it, you love it, and it's really on chain.

The one gaming token I'd even consider

Right now there's only one crypto gaming token I think could even be decent, and that's called Dragginz. It's going to be the first fully on-chain MMO on the Internet Computer. But I'm not holding any Dragginz, for two reasons: the game's not out yet, and I'm not going to invest in crypto gaming anymore.

What I'd rather invest in: Internet Computer

What I think the best thing to invest in is something with the most asymmetric risk, which to me is Internet Computer Protocol. ICP is the first real third-generation blockchain. I've done a lot of videos on it across my channel, but I'd rather hold Internet Computer Protocol than any other crypto. Why? Because in my opinion the odds of this going up are extremely high. I believe this could easily 100x or more. I get 14%-plus APR on my ICP while I'm staking it, so I can live indefinitely off the principal. The market cap at $4 billion, compared to what the technology can do, is light-years different from investing in something like a crypto game. To me this is the most powerful, advanced, and scalable layer-one technology in the world.

I know that because I've looked, and looked, and looked. Almost everyone else who claims their layer-one technology is the most advanced and scalable is, in my view, either lying, has never actually looked, or is intentionally ignoring Internet Computer. So to me, Internet Computer is my idea of an ideal investment, and that's why I have almost 5,000 of the tokens — around $40,000 today. This is also why I've come to sell altcoins for ICP rather than chase the next gaming coin.

My next pick: Tagger

My next ideal investment after that is Tagger, because Tagger is a social media platform built on ICP that I actually use every single day. It's fully functional, fully on chain, with a real utility and a real business system — something I can actually use, and something that could scale huge, because it's simply a way better deal than using regular social media. There are people who are going to value that heavily. As more people get off of and delete these other social media platforms, and the more they see they're just getting exploited, the more they'll look for alternatives like this. Most people just don't realize it exists yet.

By holding Tagger, you get paid every week in ICP from the business system. So instead of dumping $16 a month into X and having no share and no real control myself, I have about 1,115 Tagger tokens — 0.37% of the whole supply. This is a baby market cap. That gives me a real ownership stake, because it's fully on chain. To me, this is what I want to invest in: something I actually use every day, something that plays a useful role in my life. Internet Computer, Tagger, and OpenChat all play a genuinely useful role in my life. I use them every single day. Occasionally, if I go on vacation, I'll miss a day, but probably nine out of ten days I actually use these, and they're better than any other option I've found.

The bottom line

Compare that to something like crypto gaming, where most people investing are just purely hoping to get rich without even doing their own research. To me, that's an absolute dumpster fire. This is exactly why I suggest you never invest in crypto gaming — almost anything else is better.

I'd genuinely like to get to know you and hear your story, because that's how I come up with ideas for videos and how I stay accountable. You can tell me what you think about crypto gaming, ask me questions about specific coins in your portfolio, and let me know how you found me.