Web3 gaming is a term that came into the spotlight in the last bull run. With games like Axie Infinity and Splinterlands took the headlines and created an entirely new "job" perspective during the Covid lockdown period. Once that offset however everything for the most part came crumbling down. While these games still hold some decent value the bear market has been hard for many of them.
The good news... Web3 gaming and play2earn is far from dead.
The web3 gaming space is expect to grow a a 65.7 billion dollar market cap by 2027 which really isn't all that far away with 2024 rolling right around the corner here. That's up from the 4.6 billion we saw in 2022 which was towards the start of the bear market.
What we are seeing now in the bear market that's lasted nearly two years is that the play 2 earn space is still there but it's mainly now players who play and enjoy the game. Heck Splinterlands just sold nearly 300,000 packs at roughly $3.80 each in the last two weeks resulting in a total of a bit move 1.1 million dollars in sales that's still rather sizeable.
The Last Bull Run
The last bull run it seemed like it was game after game launching and many of them were clearly pure scams as in rug pulls, bad tokenomics or straight up pyramid schemes in gaming form. There were still largely solid projects that came out of it just like we have with any type of bull run market. The ones that survive and even thrive in the bear market are most likely going to be very solid bets rolling into the bull market.
We also saw gaming as one of the largest ways to onboard users to a blockchain. It's simply one of the largest market shares that appeal to so many users over other things like investing and finance. Social will most likely be a key part of this as well which is why I feel the Hive blockchain is starting to really prime itself for mainstream adoption.
The Pain Points
A lot of focus during the last bull run was to develop something dumb and simple just so it could be launched and released to the world and gobble up market share. We always see this during bull runs. However those that survived seem to all have one thing in common. They pride themselves in brining depth to the game. They offer real gaming experiences and strategies while the secondary focus is on finances. This has started to return main stream gamers back on to web3 / crypto gaming as we are seeing a real blend into real triple a titles such as metalcore would be a key example of this. We are even seeing gaming blockchains like Gala games focusing more on real game building and seen a number of titled released to it this year.
Real Growth
The real growth in the web3 gaming space will be coming very soon. Development times for solid gaming production is normally 2 years if not upwards of 5+ for some major titles. That means companies that started to develop in the last bull run will now finally be nearly ready for release of their main core games just in time for what most likely will be this next bull market run. Traditional gaming is a 281 billion dollar market cap but that's just the buying and selling of games themselves. When you start to toss in real assets that can be traded, sold etc and packs etc along with everything that goes with it such as streaming, sponsorships, teamups, partnerships etc that this market cap quickly explodes.
What are you thoughts on web3 gaming and are you actively taking a part in it?