There's still a lot of talk about blockchain gaming and the boom it had back in 2021 bull run. However since then it feels like the industry has struggled a bit in terms of getting world wide adoption and just any game actully being fun or even close to mainstream games.

In this article I want to take a look at where we are in the gaming space currently and what it most likely will take to get towards major web3 crypto gaming adoption.

The Current Lay Of The Land

With the massive bull market of 2021 gaming was huge and could mainly be contributed to the lock downs of the time where no one was really able to do much of anything else. Fast forward to today and only a few of those games emerge from the ashes and those that do still find themselves struggling for the most part.

This could be because more games are not being released, it could also be that better games are being released or it could be. It could be any number of these things but what we are also seeing is that new blockchains are now becoming dominating factors in these space. Where it was once primarily WAX as the main gaming blockchain it's now been replaced with other blockchains such as Ronin being number one Polygon, Near, Klaytn, Nebula SKALE and Immutable pulling into the back.
This screenshot was taken from DappRadar

This goes to show us there's massive growth still happening in the gaming space but it's now a very competitive system in terms of blockchains and the games on them.

For example Ronin's biggest game is Pixels but it also has large databases that are coming to be such as Carv. Carv is like what we see here on hive with Arcade Colony or places like Gala games which is a hub for games to be released on. It's also very clear that this is yet another popular place that is getting a lot of competition.

Evolution

Web 2 gaming or mainstream gaming has been stuck in a rut for some time now. With major games being released and just falling flat with horrible performance and user reviews or a rather empty game. It's pretty clear that these platforms are starting to just be disconnected to gamers and what they want and that ofte times projects become so ambitious that they never really form into something to be released or at least released well.

This is where a new style of game is starting to come out and shine and that's the stages or "build in public" moto.

The idea behind it is that the game never really is fully done instead it gets released in stages. We saw a recent example of this when the game Pixels released into "chapter 2" which is really just a set of updates to the overall game and adding in new features. This creates speculation of what might be added, when it will be added and also massive community ideas and feedback from the community allowing the developers to better understand what people want.

This normally doesn't drive around revenue either which is what major projects are now hung up on. Of course some people if not all want to make some revenue from the game and see their assets go up why not! But what matters more is that you continue to build a solid game that slowly grows and advances.

A game here on hive Splinterlands could take a few notes from this. Right now the primary focus in onboarding user experience which yes is important but shouldn't just be about that. If there's enough hype and demand for a game people will make teaching youtube videos and help each other out it's just what happens like we have seen with Pixels. But there should be a option to get in and start playing which many of these games currently do. The idea of having a deck you can play with but not earn rewards with until you "unlock" it into a NFT status is what many games do and have done and has work very well.