Investment in the blockchain gaming sector has already broken $3 billion in 2022, compared to $4.2 billion across the whole of 2021. Thanks to pioneering games such as the wildly successful Axie Infinity which has surpassed 2 million daily players, as well as the likes of Upland, Splinterlands, and Blankos Block Party, awareness of the ‘play-to-earn’ gaming model is widespread.
Despite these healthy indicators, I’d argue that blockchain gaming as we know it can’t survive; or will at best remain a gaming niche that never reaches mass adoption. If blockchain gaming hopes to grow, the current model of siloed economies and experiences will become increasingly impractical - and alienate all but the most committed play-to-earners. That’s a problem for the vast majority of the 3 billion or so daily gamers worldwide, for whom high friction and high barriers to entry equate to low fun. So while investment in blockchain gaming is considerable, and awareness of it is widespread, there’s a lot of work to be done before mainstream adoption can follow suit. It’s clear that blockchain gaming must evolve. But how?
Scaling blockchain gaming
The financialization of various in-game items and, most importantly, of people’s time, has undoubtedly created room in gaming for new types of player and even non-playing personas such as investors and guilds. Any successful model of blockchain gaming will therefore undoubtedly include elements of investment and economy ownership, and of course play-to-earn. But the most important piece is driving mass adoption. The blockchain gaming play that succeeds with the “normies,” will also become the biggest web3 onboarder on earth.
The billions of gamers worldwide play games because gameplay is fun. They rely on free-to-play content and use whatever device is available to them (mainly mobile). A blockchain gaming model that compromises these mass-market dynamics is unsustainable and unscalable. The starting point for any blockchain gaming model, then, should be what made gaming great in the first place - fun. From this position, we must create a multi-faceted offer that caters to and provides choice to each of: investors, guilds, NFT collectors, game studios, independent creators, play-to-earn scholars - and every ‘type’ of regular gamer in between. That’s the holy grail of blockchain gaming.
Platforms, not just games
So, if making blockchain gaming viable in the long-term is a case of providing scale, ease and choice to players, it stands to reason that we need blockchain gaming platforms, not just blockchain games. Why?
Quite simply because creating a single game that appeals to and retains billions of players is impossible, on or off-blockchain. Assuming people want to continue playing multiple games as they do currently, it’s not going to be viable to have tens of thousands of separate, unique blockchain game economies. Users would accrue dozens of different wallets and tokens on multiple blockchains - a far cry from the seamless interfaces and payments infrastructures that are ubiquitous in mainstream gaming and entertainment such as music and video streaming.
Rather than the next great game, we should instead be thinking about how we create a blockchain gaming platform that rivals the size and variety of Steam or the Apple App Store. But instead of walled gardens run by web2 tech giants, imagine what those platforms could look like when married with the key principles of web3: transparency, decentralization, and community ownership.
Winning blockchain gaming
If we get it right, gaming’s shift from web2 to web3 will be much more significant than, say, an upgrade from PS4 to PS5 or iOS14 to iOS15. Rather than a shiny reskin with a few nice upgrades, it’s a chance to rebuild fundamental elements of the video games world, provide fair reward for people’s valuable time and talent, offer ownership of their favourite games and experiences, and give players a say in how they are evolved.
Before any of this can happen at scale, we need to focus on making blockchain gaming cater to everyone from play-to-earners to casual gamers, with multiple ways of playing and engaging. Ideally, this needs to be within a small number of multi-faceted ecosystems that bring together multiple games under one economy and one seamless UX; avoiding the interoperability constraints of web2 ‘metaverse’ platforms. If we get this wrong, blockchain gaming could be doomed to remain a siloed series of niche play-to-earn experiences.