GameFi Graveyard: Why 75% of Web3 Games Never Make It

CoinGecko just dropped a sobering reality check on the GameFi space—and the numbers are brutal.

Out of 2,817 Web3 games launched between 2018-2023, over 2,100 are already dead. We’re talking about a cumulative failure rate that would make any industry blush. Here’s the breakdown:

The Timeline of Collapse

2018: The P2E gold rush. CryptoKitties sparked mania, 422 games launched… 307 failed (72.7% failure rate). Red flag #1 ignored.

2019-2020: Crypto winter + GameFi fatigue. Only 244 launches combined, but 230 projects cratered at nearly 94% failure rates each year. This is where most devs learned the hard lesson.

2021: The bull run bounce-back. Failure rate dropped to 45.9%—the lowest on record. People thought we’d figured it out. Spoiler: we hadn’t.

2022: The massacre year. 107.1% failure rate (more games died than launched that year). 742 inactive projects. The bear market didn’t just hurt GameFi—it obliterated it.

2023: Stabilization incoming? Failure rate fell to 70.7%, with 509 projects going dark. The pace of death is slowing, which might signal the industry is finally separating quality from garbage.

What This Actually Means

CoinGecko’s definition of “dead” is anything with a 99%+ drop in 14-day active users. Translation: these games lost all their players. Overnight.

The fact that failure rates are declining doesn’t mean GameFi is fixed—it means most of the trash has already been cleaned out. What remains are projects with actual retention mechanics, real-money incentives that work, and communities that stick around.

The lesson? P2E as a standalone hook is dead. What survives now needs to be a game first, economy second—not the other way around.