Web3 Gaming Sustainability Will be Built On Player-Owned Economies, VOYA Games Oliver Löffler

• Player-driven and owned economies could be the key to answering Web3 gaming’s sustainability problem.
• VOYA Labs was co-founded by the creator of Idle Miner Tycoon, which was acquired by Ubisoft in 2021.
• Craft World’s mainnet launch is expected to go live this summer.

Web3 gaming’s shift toward player-driven and owned economies is taking a myriad of forms, and Craft World, a tap-to-play game where players generate on-chain resources, tokens, and collectibles in a Dinosaur-themed gaming universe, is the latest to make this bid.

We spoke with Oliver Löffler, CEO and co-founder of VOYA Games, a Germany-based Web3 gaming firm, to learn more about its upcoming flagship launch.

Diving into Web3

Löffler’s first startup was Kollibri Games, where he built games with his friends from a student apartment in Germany.

His studio created Idle Miner Tycoon, a mobile game that garnered over 100 million downloads.

“It was a simple mining sim, but players loved the progression loop,” Löffler said.

It had started as a side project that spiralled into a “full-blown studio” growing to over 100 staff.

In 2021, it was acquired by Ubisoft , which Löffler describes as a “surreal” moment. He would go on to found VOYA in 2022.

“It taught me a lot. Not just how to scale games, but how to scale teams, pipelines, and community engagement. Those lessons, especially around product focus, shipping fast, and keeping games fun-first, are the foundation for how we’re building VOYA Games today,” Löffler noted.

“Honestly, building in Web3 feels like a completely different challenge,”— instead of taking the approach of porting Web2 titles onto the blockchain, VOYA wanted to start building from the ground up.

However, Löffler notes that one of the biggest differences is that in Web2, the developers control the economy, and in Web3, it’s the players.

“That shift forces you to design systems that are resilient, open-ended, and fair. You can’t patch your way out of a broken token economy; you need to get the foundation right from day one.”

Moreover, he believes that players in Web3 are also participants who actively help shape and improve the game.

Player-Owned

VOYA Games is on a mission to create “thriving player-owned economies. ” Under its Angry Dynomites Lab studio and IP, it’s launching Craft World, a dinosaur-themed resource farming Web3 game.

The firm’s stated aim echoes a broader trend of Web3 gaming projects that are more interested in the long-term than speculative hype trains. Löffler explains:

“Craft World’s really the foundation of what we’re building at VOYA Games. The idea was simple: make something fun and approachable, something you can just tap and play, but over time, it opens up into this deeper economy that’s completely player-owned.”

From the start, Craft World comes loaded with over 25 on-chain resources, not just cosmetics or collectibles, “they’re actual materials” used for crafting, building, and trading.

“The cool part is they sit in your wallet. You can send them to a friend, trade them, or lend them out. And we actually don’t control any of that, players do,” Löffler highlights.

Built on top is Project Voyager, a companion app designed to encourage and incentivize “meaningful participation.” It’s part of a broader meta-game in which players are working together to build a starship for their dinosaurs.

Rewards from participation can be leveraged in a number of ways, giving players plenty of options to cash out, keep building, upgrade their characters, and so on.

Player-Driven

For Löffler, Web3 gaming is past the hype phase, and in 2025, it’s important to build games where people show up, even if the tokens drop to zero.

It’s about building games that are “sticky, approachable, and player first” to attract “real gamers” instead of speculators.

Titles like EVE Frontier and MapleStory Universe are leading this movement with huge, robust, and rich player-driven economies.

Both titles feature mechanics that allow players to not only get rewarded for their in-game activity but also earn from crafting in-game experiences, applications, and much more.

Löffler explains that VOYA is taking a different approach, namely in how they integrate the player-owned economy across multiple games. Craft World is designed to onboard players, but it contains resources represented as 25 on-chain tokens.

“Most Web3 games stick to one or two tokens, maybe an NFT collection but we want to push the boundaries and show that it can also work sustainably with more tokens.”

So far, this has seen players conduct over 100,000 in-game resource swaps a day, “that’s real liquidity moving through the economy, it’s all player-driven,” Löffler adds.

Leveraging DeFi mechanics, player-provided liquidity pools sit at the center of the ecosystem’s economy. In the long term, there are plans to integrate loan protocols and futures contracts that can “expand possibilities for players.”

In the long term, Löffler would like to allow other developers to plug into their system using their tokens and infrastructure.

“If we get that right, VOYA Games isn’t just a game studio; it becomes a platform for a new kind of open, player-owned gaming universe,” he notes.

The Long-Term

A big problem in Web3 gaming is sustainability. Whether or not the token can provide players with value has been a factor in the short—and long-term success of any project in the space.

Sure, utility is great, but Web3 gaming’s reputation has been largely built on play-to-earn mechanics and earning potential, not the amount of fun you can have.

Craft World isn’t about pushing financial assets, says Löffler. Dyno Coin, a purely utility token for in-game progress to “unlock fun, to craft, to trade.” He adds that if players enjoy the game, they’ll want more of it, naturally.

“The only way to get it is by actually playing, completing quests, or acquiring it from other players, not through insider allocations or presales. That’s the key to sustainability: create token sinks that are fun within the game.”

Löffler posits that players won’t drop off if the game’s native token(s) fluctuate. He notes its why the project has avoided creating anything that “feels extractive,”

“Our tokens are fair launch, community-first. We don’t hold back allocations for insiders or early investors. If we’re building a player-owned economy, that ownership needs to be real and shared.”

Beyond building fun, scalable, on-chain games that don’t chase short-term pumps or speculative markets, Löffler believes the firm has a “responsibility” to bridge Web2 and Web3.

“Most gamers don’t care about wallets or decentralization; they care about fun. If we can make Web3 feel invisible at first but rewarding over time, then we’ll have done our part in moving the whole space forward,” he adds.

Indeed, Web3 gaming needs to make the speculative side of playing less appealing if it wishes to retain players. As seen on Telegram with Bombie and others, if people are speculating on gaming outcomes, they’ll stop playing when there’s nothing left to speculate on.

Growth

There’s still plenty of room for the sector to grow. Löffler admits he tends to keep an eye on smaller, casual Web3 gaming, “that’s usually where you see the most experimentation”, he notes.

They typically have smaller teams “that are really trying to figure out what works in this space,” and can rapidly iterate on their innovative, creative game mechanics.

“A lot of the big-budget projects look great, but I think Web3 still needs way more testing, learning, and innovation. That’s why I really respect what some of the smaller teams are doing, they’re not afraid to try new things and move fast,” Löffler adds.

Championing Craft World’s home chain, Ronin, Löffler names Cambria, Pixels, and Fishing Frenzy as some of the more unique Web3 titles available today in terms of how they approach gameplay, growth, and community.

In-Play

When it comes to scaling the VOYA ecosystem, the plan is to build a multi-game world that is connected through shared assets, currencies, and player identity.

Resources gathered in Craft World can eventually be used to build items, tools, weapons, or traded into creator-focused experiences within the same economy.

So far, the response to Craft World has “been incredible,” says Löffler.

He’s pleased to see players signing up, logging in, crafting, trading, forming guilds, sharing strategies, and doing all the fun in-game activities and community-building that could serve to build the sustainable ecosystem he envisioned.

He notes that within the first 20 days of launching Project Voyager, which connects directly to Craft World, over 2.7 million accounts were created, over 2.8 million on-chain trades were recorded, with around 40,000 weekly active traders.

Naturally, there were some growing pains with scalability issues , bugs, and a fairly steep learning curve, but the team has been listening to the community and are improving things week by week.

The Future

Looking ahead into 2026, Löffler is hopeful that he’ll be able to proudly look back on building a player-owned economy across three interconnected games that can “actually work at scale,” not just in theory.

“Another big one for me is sustainability. If we’ve kept at least 100,000+ monthly active players for several months without overspending on marketing and actually generating enough revenue to support the ecosystem, that’s a huge milestone,” he adds.

For Löffler, this would demonstrate that players are genuinely relishing what VOYA is building, not just there for the hype.

Most importantly of all, it’s about building a community of Web3 and Web3 players that love videogames. This means supporting each other, exploring, competing, contributing, and building together.

“If we’ve created something that feels like home for them, where making money is secondary to having fun and feeling ownership then I think we’ve done our job,” Löffler notes.

If Web3 gaming has proven anything, it’s that gamers want more from their games. And thanks to the inherently social nature of crypto and the possibilities that blockchain opens up, players will be able to do more than ever before.