Understanding the business model of blockchain games through the lens of a Blockchain Business Model Canvas

Through token-based systems, blockchain games shift value creation, delivery, and capture from the linear developer-controlled process of goods-dominant logic to a circular flow shaped by the broader community. This paper terms this shift community-mediated value logic, an extension and synthesis of service-dominant logic and platform ecosystem theory under tokenized, partially decentralized conditions. Under this model, tokens tie co-creation to value capture, while redistributing some of the architectural control from the developer to the community. The Business Model Canvas (BMC), built around firm-centric linear value flows, does not capture this dynamic, and recent extensions of the BMC remain additive or configurational, retaining its underlying linear logic. This study uses sixteen semi-structured interviews with team members, players, investors, and ecosystem partners, analyzed through the Gioia methodology, to develop a Blockchain Business Model Canvas (BBMC) designed around circular value flows rather than retrofitted from a linear value chain. The BBMC reframes the four domains of the BMC: the Customer Interface becomes a Participatory Community Interface; Infrastructure Management becomes Hybrid Infrastructure; Financial Aspects are reconstructed as an Economic System; and the Product is repositioned as an Emergent Product shaped through community participation rather than predetermined solely by the developer. A typology of operational, governance, and symbolic decentralization applies as an analytical lens at every block, making visible how the degree of community mediation depends on design. The study offers the BBMC as a theoretically grounded analytical framework for blockchain gaming ecosystems and a provisional reference for researchers and practitioners studying adjacent token-native ecosystems.