Chairman of the Solana Foundation: Chain gaming is dead, and the industry's multi-billion dollar investment may become one of the worst bets

Comparing news, Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu said blockchain games will not return. She believes that although the industry had hoped to drive the development of Web3 and the metaverse through on-chain assets and an open world, the actual performance fell far short of expectations.

Solana was once regarded as one of the public chains with the greatest potential to support large-scale chain games, supporting real-time interaction with high performance and low cost. However, although projects including Star Atlas and Stepn received attention for a while, the overall GameFi circuit has continued to decline since its peak in 2021.

Market opinion points out that chain games have long relied on token incentive models such as play-to-earn, but they lack the ability to actually attract core players in gameplay and content construction, resulting in insufficient user retention and ecological sustainability. Institutions including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Framework Ventures, and Animoca Brands have invested billions of dollars in this field, but the returns have been poor.

However, some companies are still exploring transformation paths, such as Mythical Games and Gunzilla Games, gradually weakening blockchain elements as optional features rather than core mechanisms to improve user experience and market acceptance.