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For anyone who hasn't seen "the problem with nfts": The basic, fundamental problem of play to earn games is that they rely on the fact that the thing that makes you come back is a want for fiat money. The problem with that is that what i just described isn't a game, it's a job.

Sure, current games are basically just gachas with nfts slapped on them, but eventually you'll get actually playable games with actual gameplay, and you might think that that might entice non-worker gamers to give it a try, but the reality of it is that if your game can be pay to win, which play to earn games have to be (otherwise the reward you get cannot be re-invested in the game, which is bad for busines), then people are going to pay for that win, making the game fun exclusively to whales. Current not play to earn games struggle with this problem already, eg WoW has had to control inflation heavily, in part because of a lack of real money sinks, but also in part because paying to win by buying gold is extremely efficient and often times the optimal strategy.

Basically, take the age-old "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game", and merge it with the fact that play-to-earn games are typically not fun at all the begin with, and you end up reinventing a job that is entirely artificial and whose value-add is null to everyone but its creators and highest whales.

There's research that suggests games where the player doesn't play for the sake of playing are bad for mental health e.g. playing due to FOMO, external rewards, etc. [1]

> It wasn’t the quantity of gaming, but the quality that counted... if they felt they had to play, they felt worse.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-07-27-gaming-does-not-appear-...

People played Runescape, WoW, StarCraft, many others to gain items they could swap for cash — I see the issues that come along with giving publishers more involvement, but, to say it's a new concept etc seems wrong.
In Diablo II there were these sites that you could buy gear from. A bot joined you game and you either gave it the item if you sold it or gave you the item if you bought it. So I guess it had play-to-earn.

In a way Diablo II was way more decentrilized than these strange cryptocurrency game contraptions.