orginal written in 2024-07-17

Abstract

Play-to-Earn (P2E) and Create-to-Earn have been widely promoted as the future of the game industry, particularly within crypto-native and so-called Autonomous World narratives. These models promise economic participation, ownership, and creator empowerment. This paper argues that such promises rest on a structural misunderstanding of what makes games function as games. Once a game economy is required to interoperate with real-world productivity and labor markets, it ceases to be a game and becomes an industrial system. The result is not empowerment, but the collapse of play.

1. The Ambiguity of “Autonomous World”

The term Autonomous World originated from fully on-chain games, but it has since expanded into a vague umbrella concept. Its appeal lies precisely in this ambiguity. When pressed for a precise definition, proponents often retreat into abstraction: autonomy of code, autonomy of agents, autonomy of economies.

Yet autonomy without boundary conditions is meaningless. A system is not autonomous simply because it is decentralized or self-executing. The critical question is whether the system can remain structurally closed—that is, insulated from external production forces—while sustaining internal meaning and motivation.

Most so-called Autonomous Worlds fail this test.

2. Roblox Is Not a Counterexample

Roblox is frequently cited as evidence that Create-to-Earn works. This comparison is misleading.

Structurally, Roblox functions as:

  • a game engine comparable to Unity,
  • a distribution and discovery layer comparable to Steam,
  • a tightly controlled internal economy with platform-governed exchange rates.

Roblox succeeds not because it externalizes value, but because it contains it. Its currency is redeemable, but not free-floating. Its labor market is curated, throttled, and asymmetrically governed. Most participants do not meaningfully earn; they learn, experiment, and occasionally graduate into a creator role.

Roblox does not collapse because it does not pretend to be an open labor economy.

3. The Inevitable Floor of Play-to-Earn

Play-to-Earn collapses toward a single outcome: the global minimum wage.

Once earning becomes a primary motivation, optimization replaces play. Bots, automation, and organized farming emerge naturally—not as exploits, but as rational responses. The game economy is then forced to compete with real-world labor markets, where productivity, scale, and automation dominate.

At this point:

  • fairness degrades,
  • intrinsic motivation disappears,
  • and game design regresses into repetitive extraction loops.

The system does not fail accidentally. It fails deterministically.

4. Why Dual-Currency and Consumable Economies Only Delay Collapse

Some games attempt to mitigate inflation through sophisticated economic design. Path of Exile famously abandoned single-currency systems in favor of consumable currencies that double as crafting resources.

This design achieves two things:

  • it slows inflation,
  • it turns gold farmers into liquidity providers rather than pure adversaries.

However, this is not a solution—only a delay. Even in such systems, economic reset remains necessary. New leagues function as controlled world reboots. The underlying reason is simple: real-world productivity always outpaces closed virtual economies.

No in-game mechanism can permanently absorb external labor pressure.

5. Crypto-Native Games and the Exception That Proves the Rule

Dark Forest is often cited as a successful crypto-native game. It is an exception precisely because automation and bots do not undermine its core gameplay. Strategic opacity, information asymmetry, and cognitive load are integral to the experience.

But this reveals a crucial truth:
Dark Forest is compelling despite economicization, not because of it.

Moreover, such games appeal primarily to:

  • speculators who do not meaningfully play, and
  • intellectual hobbyists who enjoy system construction rather than immersion.

They are not representative of mainstream games, nor are they evidence that earning-based play scales.

6. The Destruction of the Fictional World

Games rely on a fragile contract: the player agrees to suspend reality in exchange for meaning within a fictional system.

Create-to-Earn and NFT-based mechanics fracture this contract. Once players become conscious of themselves as labor units within a hyper-industrialized pipeline, immersion collapses. The game world is no longer a world—it is a dashboard.

What is lost is not balance, but fictional coherence.

7. Conclusion: Earning Is Not the Future of Play

Play-to-Earn and Create-to-Earn do not resolve the structural problems of the game industry. They externalize them. By linking games to real-world productivity, they ensure that:

  • play is subordinated to labor,
  • creativity is subordinated to optimization,
  • and worlds are subordinated to markets.

A system that must compete with reality will always lose its fiction.

The future of games will not be built on earning.
It will be built on boundaries.