Part 12. The Future of Game Business Models and Society — Do New Technologies Create New Habit-Spaces?

Core question: Are new technologies creating new spaces for payment habits, or are they merely being layered over spaces that already exist?

Technology Arrives Before Habits

Looking back over the history of the game industry, one pattern repeats: technology precedes habit.

When consoles with replaceable cartridges appeared, the payment habit already existed; game cartridges landed on the established habit of buying books and LPs. When flat-rate internet became widespread, people were already accustomed to paying subscriptions for newspapers. When free-to-play appeared, it was preceded by the shareware logic of “try it free, then buy more if you want it.”

What happens when technology arrives before the habit? The laserdisc games in Part 6, the 3DO in Part 7, and MLG television in Part 11 provide the answer. The technology was sufficient, but there was no habit-space on which it could land.

Since the late 2010s, several new technologies have entered the game industry at once: VR, blockchain, AI, and cloud streaming. We will examine whether each created a new payment habit-space, landed in an existing one, or is still drifting without a space of its own.

VR Games — Bringing the Theme-Park Experience Home

Technical experiments with virtual-reality games have a long history. VR devices existed in the 1990s, but their technology and price prevented mass adoption. The commercial launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in 2016 is commonly regarded as the starting point of the modern VR game market.

The Oculus Quest launched in 2019. It was a standalone wireless VR headset that worked without a PC connection. In 2020, the Oculus Quest 2 lowered the price to $299. Meta, formerly Facebook, changed the Oculus brand to Meta Quest in early 2022.

One of the most successful VR games is Beat Saber (Beat Games, 2018). Players slice blocks with lightsabers in time with music. Its model combines a $29.99 base package with additional music packs as DLC, priced around $12.99–14.99. Artist packs have featured Billie Eilish, Linkin Park, BTS, and others.

The payment habit-space on which Beat Saber landed was music purchasing plus rhythm games such as DDR and Taiko no Tatsujin. People who like music buy additional packs by favorite artists. Two already-familiar habit-spaces were placed on top of VR technology.

VR arcades: VR arcades emerged for customers reluctant to buy a personal device costing $300–500. They sell VR experiences by time, often $10–20 per thirty minutes. This is the same structure as the video arcade discussed in Part 6: “You can buy the experience without owning the machine.” Its payment habit-space is the theme-park attraction admission fee.

The VR game market, however, is still widely considered short of its mass-adoption threshold. Obstacles include the absence of a killer app—an experience that truly must be done in VR—the discomfort of wearing a headset for long periods, and the need for enough physical space.

In 2024, Apple released the Apple Vision Pro for $3,499. It foregrounded “spatial computing,” placing smartphone and PC screens into physical space, and emphasized productivity and entertainment more than games. This can be read as an effort to connect its payment habit-space not to “VR gaming,” but to “premium private theater” and “workplace multi-monitor setup.” At the time of writing, its early sales and prospects for sustained growth remain under observation.

The P2E Experiment and Collapse — Axie Infinity

P2E (Play-to-Earn) is a structure in which people obtain cryptocurrency or NFT assets through play and can convert them into cash.

Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis, 2018) is both the signature P2E case and its most dramatic collapse.

Axies are monster characters issued as NFTs. Battling with them earned a token called SLP, or Smooth Love Potion. SLP could be exchanged for cash on cryptocurrency exchanges.

In 2021, as COVID-19 increased unemployment in the Philippines, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia, Axie Infinity was used as a means of livelihood. Reports suggested that playing for several hours a day could yield an income comparable to the local minimum wage. Daily active users peaked at roughly 2.7 million in late 2021.

The structure worked while the SLP token price was high, but it had a structural flaw: more SLP was produced than consumed. Existing users’ SLP retained value only while new users kept arriving to buy Axies as NFTs. When that influx slowed, the token price fell.

In March 2022, Axie Infinity’s sidechain, the Ronin Network, was hacked. Cryptocurrency worth approximately $625 million was stolen, making it one of the largest crypto hacks at the time. The SLP price collapsed by more than 99 percent from its 2021 peak, while daily active users fell by roughly 90 percent or more.

The structural limit of P2E became visible. “Earn money by playing” landed in the payment habit-space of compensation for labor: work and receive a reward. Yet this structure requires a continuous inflow of external money. If the game itself does not generate value, new investors end up financing the returns of existing users.

Inside the P2E Business Model — What Works and What Breaks

It is superficial to read the failures of Axie Infinity and WEMIX as proof that “blockchain fails.” More precisely, the internal structure of their token economies collapsed.

A sustainable token economy requires balance between production—the issuing and earning of tokens—and burning—the removal and consumption of tokens. This is the same principle that governs conventional in-game resources such as gold and diamonds. If Clash of Clans produces too much gold with nowhere to spend it, gold loses value. Blockchain tokens are no different.

Structurally, SLP collapsed because its production path, combat, overwhelmingly exceeded its consumption path, Axie breeding. As long as new users kept entering, breeding demand absorbed production. When the influx stopped, production remained without consumption.

A balancing mechanism: token burning

When a listed company buys back and retires its own shares, the number of shares in circulation falls and the value per share rises. Without a special cash dividend, the higher market price itself returns value to shareholders. A token economy can be designed on the same principle.

Imagine a round-based token allocation model. Users receive tokens in rounds when they participate by playing, contributing, or trading. At the same time, tokens are burned when users perform certain in-game activities such as crafting advanced items, entering special missions, or unlocking premium content. If the service also uses part of its revenue to repurchase and burn tokens, circulating supply decreases and the value of the remaining tokens can rise.

In this structure, users who acquired many tokens in early rounds receive a “de facto dividend through price appreciation.” Their return comes from the rising value of the tokens they hold, not a cash payment. Unlike Axie’s daily cash-out model, it favors long-term holders.

Checklist for sustainable P2E:

1. If the production rate exceeds the burn rate, inflation follows. Burn paths must be designed.
2. Burning must be enjoyable. Forced consumption drives users away. Spending tokens should itself be a good experience, through advanced crafting, special content, or community events.
3. Dependence on external capital must be minimized. Can the internal game economy circulate on its own?
4. Speculators and actual users must be distinguished. A player who naturally spends tokens while enjoying the game behaves differently from someone who enters for the token price and cashes out quickly. Mixing the two groups destabilizes the structure.

The promise of P2E lies not in “make money by playing,” but in “contribute to a game ecosystem and participate in its growth.” Axie Infinity’s failure does not invalidate that logic itself. Its internal token-economy design collapsed.

NFT Game Items — An Experiment in Digital Ownership

NFT game items using blockchain technology proposed “true digital ownership.” As in the Sony license-revocation controversy discussed in Part 7, the argument was that NFTs would solve the risk of users losing a game or item when a platform removed it. Because an NFT item existed on a blockchain rather than on the platform, no one could take it away.

Ubisoft Quartz (2021): Ubisoft introduced an NFT game-item system into Ghost Recon Breakpoint. User resistance was fierce; the announcement video’s YouTube like-to-dislike ratio was overwhelmingly negative, and Ubisoft effectively withdrew the program.

The logic behind the backlash was simple: “I already paid $60 for the game. Do I have to buy its items separately as NFTs as well?” The offer collided with the established payment habit-space of buying a packaged game.

Steam’s ban on NFT and blockchain games (2021): Valve prohibited games containing NFTs or blockchain-based assets from being released on Steam. It said that creating real-world value for in-game assets conflicted with Steam policy. Steam users generally supported the decision.

NFT game items face a habit-space problem because players are accustomed to items having meaning only inside their game. Carrying an item into another game or converting it into cash is not a normal practice. The NFT value proposition—true ownership and tradability—did not fit established gamer habits well.

Failure Case: Google Stadia — Sufficient Technology, Missing Habit

Google Stadia was a cloud game-streaming service launched in 2019. It streamed games over an internet connection without requiring a high-end PC or console.

Its pricing was hybrid: a free base plan, a Pro subscription at $9.99 per month, and separate game purchases such as $59.99. Even subscribers still had to buy individual games.

Google founded Stadia Games and Entertainment to develop first-party titles, but closed it in 2021. The promised exclusive content never arrived.

Google shut Stadia down in January 2023 and refunded users for purchased games.

Stadia had no habit-space on which to land. Existing gamers already had libraries on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox and had no reason to buy the same games again on Stadia. To nongamers, cloud gaming itself was an unfamiliar concept. “Play on a television without a console or PC” had no place in their existing habits.

Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now, by contrast, approached the problem differently. GeForce Now runs games that users already own on Steam and elsewhere in the cloud, promising access to an existing library anywhere without repurchasing it. Xbox Cloud Gaming is included with Game Pass and lets users play hundreds of games on a smartphone without separate purchases. Cloud technology was layered onto the established payment habit of a Game Pass subscription.

Stadia attempted to create a new habit. Xbox Cloud and GeForce Now put technology on an existing habit. Their results differed accordingly.

Gamification — Game Mechanics Move into Other Industries

Game mechanics such as scores, levels, streaks, leaderboards, and rewards are moving beyond games. This is called gamification.

Duolingo: This language-learning app uses streaks, experience points, weekly competitive leagues, items such as Streak Freeze, and its owl character Duo—all game elements. Users can study free with ads, or subscribe to Super Duolingo for roughly $6.99–12.99 a month for ad-free use and unlimited hearts.

One of Duolingo’s central payment triggers is its heart system. Wrong answers consume hearts. When hearts run out, users must stop and wait or pay to refill them. It has the same structure as the energy system in the mobile games discussed in Part 9: an educational app directly transplanting a game monetization mechanism.

Duolingo reportedly had approximately 6.6 million subscribers in 2023.

Healthcare gamification: Exercise apps such as Nike Run Club and Strava manage running records like game achievements. Just as Pokémon GO combined walking and collecting in Part 9, the combination of exercise and game mechanics continues to evolve.

Educational gamification: Apps applying game elements to learning have increased in Korea’s edtech market. They use learning points, levels, and competition with friends. Engagement-retention mechanisms proven in games are being transplanted into education.

Environmental and ESG gamification: Ecosia is a search engine that contributes to tree planting through searches. It displays search counts as trees planted, giving users a visible sense of achievement. Companies are also increasingly managing employee energy-saving targets through leaderboards. The game mechanism of immediate feedback for environmental action is being applied to forming sustainable habits.

The business-model implication of gamification is that payment habit-spaces created by games—energy depletion leading to payment, ranking competition leading to payment, streak preservation leading to payment—also work outside games. “Game-like apps” often retain users and convert payments better than other apps. But when gamification copies only the surface, adding points and badges without designing the internal loop, users soon leave. Games are compelling not merely because they have levels, but because leveling leads to meaningful rewards.

Escape-Room Cafés — The Offline Rebirth of the Arcade Experience

Escape-room games, which began in Japan in 2007, spread worldwide in the 2010s. In Korea, the market grew rapidly around Gangnam, Hongdae, and other districts in the mid-2010s.

The escape-room café business model includes:

• Admission: number of participants × price, commonly $15–30 per person
• Hints: an additional fee for help with difficult puzzles
• Souvenir photos: sales of photographs taken in the themed space
• Extra time: payment to extend a session when a team fails to escape in time

Escape rooms landed in the payment habit-space of the theme-park attraction. The experience resembles lining up and entering a particular ride at an amusement park. Customers pay an admission fee to enter a designed experiential space for a fixed period.

Compared with the arcade model in Part 6, arcades charged coins by machine—coin per play—while escape rooms charge a team admission by space—space per play. The structure of paying for designed experience works even without a machine or digital technology.

After COVID-19 damaged Korea’s escape-room market, new formats appeared, including online escape rooms conducted through video calls. These experiments asked how the experience itself could be transplanted when physical space was constrained.

The growth of escape-room cafés demonstrates that the payment habit for experiences in physical space remains strong in the digital age. As digital content becomes more abundant, the scarcity value of experiences in which people participate bodily may even rise. Photo booths such as Life4Cuts, discussed in Part 6, and escape rooms belong to the same current.

The Spread and Limits of AR Games — Niantic after Pokémon GO

Pokémon GO (2016), discussed in Part 9, demonstrated the potential of augmented-reality games. Niantic subsequently released several more AR games using the same technology.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (2019): This was a location-based AR game structurally similar to Pokémon GO, launched on the strength of the global Harry Potter fandom. The service ended in January 2022.

Pikmin Bloom (with Nintendo, 2021): This AR game combined walking with collecting Pikmin and emphasized motivation for strolling rather than combat. Users buy seedlings and items with paid coins.

Ingress (2012): Niantic’s first location-based game attracted core players with gameplay more complex than Pokémon GO. Much of Pokémon GO’s PokéStop location data was based on submissions by Ingress users.

Looking again at Pokémon GO’s payment habit-space, it was not AR technology that landed, but thirty years of collecting habits built by the Pokémon series. Applying the same technology and design to the Harry Potter IP produced a different result. Since 1996, Pokémon had accumulated the habit of collecting monsters and making them stronger. Harry Potter has a powerful fandom, but “move through locations and collect traces of magic” was not part of its fans’ established habit-space.

Metaverse Games — Experiments in Paying for Virtual Space

As the metaverse drew attention in 2021, payment habits inside virtual space became a new subject.

Blockchain-based metaverses: The Sandbox, Decentraland, and others proposed that users could buy virtual real estate with NFT tokens, attach advertising, or operate games. Their claimed habit-spaces were real-estate investment and digital-asset ownership. They shared, however, the structural problems of NFT game items.

ZEPETO (Naver Z, 2018): This avatar-based social platform began in Korea. Users design and sell character clothing and items, while others buy them with paid coins. Teenagers make up a large share of its audience. It surpassed 200 million cumulative users in 2020.

ZEPETO landed in the payment habit-space of avatar decoration. A precedent was the habit of buying Minimi items for Cyworld mini-homepages in the 2000s. Paying for items that express the self in virtual space was already familiar.

Whether a metaverse payment habit becomes established appears to depend less on technical completeness than on the strength of the identity experience—“Who am I in this space?” Roblox and Fortnite successfully operated metaverse-like functions such as concerts and exhibitions because their users had already formed strong identities inside them.

Korea’s P2E Experiment — Wemade and WEMIX

If Axie Infinity represented overseas P2E experiments, Wemade’s WEMIX project unfolded in Korea around the same period.

Wemade introduced P2E elements to the global service of MIR4 (2021). Players mined Darksteel, an in-game resource, and converted it into a blockchain token. Global concurrent users grew after launch, and the WEMIX token price also rose.

In November 2022, major Korean cryptocurrency exchanges announced that they would end trading support for WEMIX. The Digital Asset eXchange Alliance, DAXA, cited discrepancies in reported circulating supply. The WEMIX price plunged. Wemade filed for legal relief but lost.

Korea’s game-regulation structure was another variable limiting P2E adoption. The Game Rating and Administration Committee classified cashing out assets acquired in games as gambling and denied ratings to such games. Some companies removed P2E features from Korean versions and operated them only in overseas services.

The payment habit-space problem for P2E is the same as with Axie Infinity. The closer users’ motivation is to “collect tokens and cash them out” rather than “play because the game is fun,” the more changes in token price dictate changes in the user population.

AI and Games — A Technology without a Habit-Space Yet

Since 2022, generative AI has also begun to affect the game industry.

Current directions for AI in games include:

• NPC dialogue: conversations generated in real time by AI rather than fixed scripts
• Procedural content generation: maps, quests, and events dynamically created by AI
• Game assistants: AI helpers that provide strategy and guidance

It is still difficult to say that a payment habit-space for “AI game content” has formed. Users tend to judge AI-made and human-made content by the same standards, and the mere fact that something was made by AI is not itself a reason to pay more.

AI Dungeon (Latitude, 2019): This GPT-based text RPG generates stories in real time. Whatever action a user enters, the AI continues the narrative. Its model combines free play with a monthly subscription—around $9.99—for faster AI access. It layers AI onto the habit-space of text-adventure games. It built a user base, though consistency in AI-generated content remained a challenge.

If AI lowers content-production costs, developers can release more content more quickly. AI may strengthen the capacity for continuous updates that was central to GaaS in Part 10. This changes the developer’s production-cost structure; it does not mean that users are directly paying for AI content. It is different from creating a new payment habit-space.

The Spread of Game Subscriptions — Transplanting the Netflix Model

Game subscription services have expanded in the 2020s, continuing the trend that began with Xbox Game Pass in Part 10.

Apple Arcade (2019): A $4.99 monthly subscription offered games without ads or in-app purchases. It targeted users tired of the free-to-play, advertising, and in-app-payment structure of mobile games. Its payment habit-space was “premium mobile games without ads or extra charges.” It did not produce a major mass-market mobile hit.

PlayStation Plus’s three-tier redesign (2022): Sony reorganized PlayStation Plus into Essential, with online multiplayer and monthly games; Extra, with a game catalog; and Premium, with classic-game streaming. The structure was a response to Xbox Game Pass.

EA Play: Electronic Arts operates this subscription service, offering access to an EA game library for $4.99 per month or $29.99 per year. It is linked to Xbox Game Pass and included for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.

The spread of game subscriptions shows the Netflix model of “everything at once” being transplanted into games. Yet games differ from video. Video audiences continuously move through new content, whereas players may spend hundreds of hours with a single game. As more people seriously play subscription-included games, publishers that find subscription revenue insufficient may reconsider participation. The balance between subscriptions and individual sales remains unsettled.

Lessons from This Chapter — A Checklist for New-Content Planners

Checkpoint 1: Before using new technology, identify the habit-space on which it will land

The failure of Google Stadia, the collapse of P2E, and resistance to NFT game items all show the same thing: technology that arrives too early drifts in a space without habits. Before introducing new technology into your content, first identify the existing payment habits of the people who will use it.

Checkpoint 2: Gamification transplants mechanisms; it does not turn everything into a game

Duolingo did not become a game company. It transplanted game mechanisms—energy systems, streaks, and leaderboards—into language learning. The question is which game mechanisms your content can borrow. The perspective is not “I will make a game,” but “I will borrow the engagement-retention structures created by games.”

Checkpoint 3: Physical experience may become scarcer and more valuable in the digital age

Escape-room cafés, Life4Cuts photo booths, and VR arcades all show that demand for direct experience that cannot be digitally replaced does not disappear. The more abundant digital content becomes, the more valuable physical experience may grow. You must locate your content between the digital and the physical and design how the two will combine.

Checkpoint 4: The P2E lesson—if the payment habit-space is “profit,” it is unsustainable

The motivation to “play in order to make money” is the reverse of “pay because the game is enjoyable.” The moment users participate expecting returns, they leave when those returns decline. Distinguish between paying because “I want this experience” and participating because “I want to earn money from this.” The former is a content business model; the latter is an investment model. Mix them and neither may work properly.

This concludes the game-industry section of Volume One. From Parts 6 through 12, game-industry payment habits moved from a single arcade coin to console packages, PC subscriptions, mobile gacha, GaaS battle passes, esports viewing, and experiments with VR and P2E. The next volume moves to the music industry. If games were a laboratory for payment habits, music is the industry that most dramatically reveals how those habits take root, collapse, and are born again.

Kim Dongeun · WhtDrgon@MEJE.kr · 2026