By Terry Ashton, updated August 14, 2024
During the last crypto boom, a new form of gaming began to garner a lot of attention. Blockchain-based titles, often framed as “play to earn”, exploded in popularity as they gave many people a way to combine two of their biggest passions – gaming and crypto.
In 2021, the internet was awash with discussions of games like CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, and Gods Unchained as they pulled in players from across the internet. While they all had different themes and graphics, they worked in mostly the same way.
In these blockchain games, players would complete tasks and challenges to unlock in-game items that would be represented by tokens or non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The concept of “play to earn” stems from the fact that these in-game items can be sold on the secondary market to other players or anyone else who wants to own these digital assets.
Sadly, much of the excitement around blockchain games fizzled out at the same time as people went off NFTs and the values of many of the most popular cryptocurrencies trended downwards.
Many of the smaller blockchain games have since folded with those that remain seeing dramatically fewer players compared to their peaks earlier in the decade.
Is that it for blockchain gaming or will these titles enjoy a second wind the next time the value of crypto springs upwards?
Other Forms of Gaming Are Still Going Strong
One of the biggest drivers behind the fall of crypto gaming was the fact that these titles focused primarily on the blockchain technology that powered them rather than creating fun and engaging content that players will want to enjoy over and over again.
The gaming industry as a whole did see a slowing in player growth around the same time as the last crypto crash, driven primarily by the fact that many people began to enjoy other forms of entertainment that hadn’t been possible for a couple of years.
Popular games remain just as in demand as ever. In particular, classic casino games like roulette continue to attract millions of players from around the world, just as they have done for centuries. This has been boosted by brands like PokerStars Casino that have created new variants of the game, including the proprietary PokerStars Roulette.
New big-name releases like Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 have also helped to engage players. Prior to its release, its predecessor attracted an average of 500,000 players at any particular moment, a figure that practically doubled following the release of Counter-Strike 2.
Other AAA blockbusters, including Grand Theft Auto Online and Minecraft, continue to enjoy the attention of millions of players every month.
With that in mind, there is not an issue with interest in games in general but just crypto games specifically. Therefore, if developers can create a title that is much more focused on fun rather than simply relying on the blockchain mechanics, we are more likely to see players interested.
What Do Blockchain Games Need for Players to Return?
Similar to how the quality of NFTs gradually degraded as the hype around them ballooned, leading to some unscrupulous folks using them to simply cash in for personal gain, blockchain gaming saw many poor-quality titles released throughout the early 2020s.
This was akin to the video game bubble and bust of the 1980s in which developers moved quickly to churn out subpar content just to rake in cash from players who were always looking for new titles to play, only for them to be put off by the slew of suboptimal games.
Gaming companies eventually overcame this drop in interest by returning to a focus on quality so that they could gradually win back past players.
This is what blockchain game developers need to do. By focusing on quality and not simply pushing the concept of “play to earn”, they can slowly begin to attract players to new releases.
This will take time, however. It’s easy to break the trust of players and it’s hard to regain it. Hard, but not impossible, so let’s watch this space.
