Play-to-earn was probably the last mega narrative that actually pulled mainstream users into crypto at scale. Back in the day, gaming guilds were literally minting money through scholarship models—they had that golden window. Some of them evolved into legit VCs or full-fledged projects that survived the crash. But plenty also went to zero. As for the games themselves? Most tried to pivot when the music stopped, but the model broke. You had guilds acting as capital providers, players grinding for yield, and tokenomics that only worked in a bull market. Once liquidity dried up, the whole ecosystem fragmented. Some of those early guild models were genius from a capital efficiency angle, but they were built on unsustainable growth assumptions. The GameFi space learned hard lessons about sustainable play incentives versus pure speculation.