Blockchain Gaming Crashes to 2025 Lows—Daily Users Nosedive

Player counts crater as crypto’s play-to-earn bubble deflates. Axie Infinity clones now trading nostalgia for liquidity.

Where did all the degens go? The ’metaverse landlords’ are too busy margin-calling their JPEGs to grind for SLP tokens.

Meanwhile, TradFi bros smirk while shorting the GameFi index—proving once again that ’disruption’ moves faster when VCs stop writing checks.

DappRadar’s blockchain analyst Sara Gherghelas noted that funding for blockchain gaming also saw a big decline, dropping nearly 70% from March to $21 million in April. However, some large ecosystem funds remain active. Arbitrum Gaming Ventures deployed its first $10 million from a $200 million fund, backing projects such as Wildcard, XAI Network, and Proof of Play.

“April 2025’s investment activity in blockchain gaming and the metaverse almost fell flat, but there’s a reason to be cautiously optimistic. This month the total capital raised reached only $21 million, marking a 69% decrease from March.”

Sara Gherghelas

As Gherghelas notes, investors are now “optimizing for sustainable models, player engagement, and actual retention, not just token hype,” what the analyst describes as the market’s “reset mode.”

“Capital is harder to secure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Weak projects are falling away, and funds are flowing into the builders who are quietly laying the groundwork for the next generation of blockchain games.”

Sara Gherghelas

Even with numbers going down, big-name gaming companies are still testing the waters with blockchain. It’s a mixed bag though — Sega dropped an NFT game called KAI: Battle of Three Kingdoms, but Square Enix bailed on Symbiogenesis after it flopped. Ubisoft’s still in the game, teaming up with Immutable for a Might & Magic blockchain card game coming later this year.

According to Gherghelas, major publishers are still showing interest, but the ones actually getting somewhere are the ones teaming up with web3 native teams. She also points out the space is shifting — less focus on hypey token models, more on solid gameplay, interoperability, and “actual user retention.”