Tonight I was watching short videos and came across a nostalgic game collection, like Happy Farm and Mole Manor, and the comments section is full of people reminiscing.

Looking at it made me think of@Pixels Pixels, which is also a farming type, where you grow crops, raise pets, and complete tasks, but it runs on the Web3 version on the Ronin chain.

The official website says there are 10 million players, and from a product perspective, it has indeed achieved a relatively large scale in the blockchain gaming space, but today I looked at the price, around 0.0072, with a market cap of about 5.52 million. It has dropped more than 99% from its peak of just over 1 yuan two years ago.

This position actually has not much to say about how much it has dropped, from 1 yuan to 1 cent and from 1 cent to 5 cents, it feels about the same.

But what I care about more is another thing.

Pixels is currently one of the largest games on the Ronin chain, and its performance can basically represent the state of the entire chain.

Ronin rose with Axie back in the day. In 2021, AXS peaked around 165, and Filipinos relied on playing Axie to support their families; that was a truly breakout blockchain game.

At that time, Ronin was specifically built for Axie, with fast transaction speeds and low gas fees, and the experience was indeed much better than the Ethereum mainnet. During that period, Ronin had daily active users in the hundreds of thousands, with NFT trading volume exceeding 4 billion, and Axie alone contributed 1.3 billion in revenue.

But that was a special period.

During the pandemic, everyone was idle at home, and the labor cost in the Philippines was so low that playing games earned more than working. Coupled with the entire crypto market being in a bull run, these three conditions came together to create that wave. Now AXS is just over 1, and has dropped 99% from its peak. The conditions are gone, and so is the heat.

Since Axie, Ronin has been looking for the next flagship. Pixels is the closest one, with user numbers increasing and game content continuously iterating. But the token price tells the story; 10 million users cannot support a market cap of 5.52 million, with an average market cap of less than 1 dollar per user. I calculated this number before; it's rarely seen so low in traditional games.

The trading volume has also shrunk in the past two days.

The unlock date two days ago surged to 30 million, and yesterday it dropped to just over 10 million. Volume shrinks and price falls, attention is rapidly fading. 84% of tokens have not been released, and they are still being released every month, but even speculators are dwindling.

The current state of the Ronin chain is also not very good. TVL is less than 5 million, and the 24h transaction fee income is 130 dollars. Not 130 thousand, but 130 dollars.

RON itself has also dropped about 7% today, around 0.094. The prices of several projects with the most presence on the chain are all going down, and the overall activity of the chain is shrinking.

Where is the problem?

It's not that Pixels is doing poorly, nor that Ronin's technology is lacking. It's that the blockchain game track itself has cooled down. That wave of Axie made many people think blockchain games were a sustainable way to make money, but later they realized it was just a special phase.

After that, no matter how well the game itself is made, the tokens cannot hold up. Because the core motivation for players to come to blockchain games is to make money, not to play games. When money cannot be made, no matter how large the user base is, it cannot support the token price.

Ronin is holding on,#pixel Pixels is also holding on.

The game is still updating, and the team is still working. But from Axie to Pixels, from 165 to 1, from 1 to 0.07, the two biggest games on the entire chain have taken the same path. It's not an issue with individual projects; it's just how this track is at this stage.

Unless one day a blockchain game appears that makes players willing to spend money instead of just making money, it will be difficult to break this cycle.

But to be honest, I can't imagine what that game would be like.

The above is only a personal observation and does not constitute investment advice.