If you've read any of my latest Play2Earn Reports you probably already noticed that I'm pretty discontent with the way things have been going for blockchain gaming. I've been feeling a little burned out with the whole thing for quite a while now and during my latest hiking trip this weekend I've finally made up my mind - I'm going to stop with most of the blockchain games I'm playing/following indefinitely. It's not that I don't believe in the vision of blockchain gaming any longer. Quite the contrary, I still believe it to be the logical next step in gaming. It's just that it's not happening right now. At all!
I've made various articles on the matter of what's going wrong with blockchain gaming in my opinion. During these last view days, I've realized that while all of the things I've brought up there are still valid, I've missed the single most important reason why things aren't getting any better. It's because we let them get away with it. It's because we still interact with these games, no matter how bad they are, no matter how obviously they are only a cash grab. We do so because we want to see blockchain gaming succeed, we do so because we might not know any better, but most importantly, we do so because we are greedy!
Let's admit it - we are putting up with things we would never accept from a normal game simply because the game is running on the blockchain! At first glance, we have good reasons to do so. Some of these so called games were a horrible experience, but people still made hundreds of dollars in the process. And it's a repeating pattern! Every week, there are new projects, sometimes barely being worth of being called a game, coming up looking for players. If you move in early enough and leave before things go south, you can turn a nice profit that way. This is all cool and everything of course, there where days where I've been making 20-30 Hive each day with blockchain games, but it's also the root of the whole issue. If we would just stop playing these awful games, they would eventually stop being made.
An excuse I often hear for all that is that blockchain gaming is a new genre and thus it will take some time for them to eventually mature. 1980s game weren't as advanced, good looking, and complex as games are today after all. While that's obviously true, it completely misses the point. Blockchain gaming is meant to be the next level for conventional gaming. So to compete with mainstream gaming, you have to be just as good as a mainstream title and then add something on top of that! Tokenization, NFTs, all that stuff has to be an added value, it needs to be something that makes a great game even better. Only then we'll see blockchain gaming succeed. But as long as we pretend that a random browser game looking like a 10 year old made it 20 years ago is the best game we've ever seen, things simply won't change. People will make shitty games to earn some quick crypto and abandon ship before it's too late.
Now I know that I won't make any difference with that decision. As long as there's money to be made, people will be there and try to get their share. The truth is, I simply don't care any more. There are projects I like and that I believe in. Splinterlands and eXode are the ones I'm most hopeful about and both might eventually be able to compete with the mainstream market. There are some more, but they are further off or have less potential in my opinion. I have not decided what I'm going to do with my Play2Earn reports as of yet. I kinda like the format and it has been my weekly flagship article for half a year now. I'll see if there's something useful I can change it into and if people want to read it I'll keep publishing it. But other than that, my focus is going to shift a bit.
I'll start writing more about the few projects I really believe in and only cover new/other blockchain games if I really consider them to be interesting. All the rest I'll just ignore moving forward, it really just isn't worth my time. I'll also try and explore more financial topics as I had done every now and then already in the last few months. On top of that, I'll probably just start to write about conventional gaming. Yes, I won't be able to use the leo tag for that. Yes, I'll receive a lot less tips on Publish0x that way. But at least I'm going to write about things I really enjoy again.
I'll still monitor the crypto gaming market for you and the moment I see something I really like, I'll be there for you and make another Is It Worth Your Time article. But for the time being, I'll just enjoy myself and write about what ever topic I feel like writing about. Actually, I'd love to explore some more Hive tribes, so if you have any ideas on what might be another interesting topic for me, please let me know in the comments and I'll gladly give it a thought.
Anyway, I really want to thank everybody that followed my journey up until here. If you only care for the crypto gaming content I've been writing about, you might find my blog to become less interesting for you sadly, but I'll try to bring you fun and interesting articles nevertheless and who knows, some years from now, when crypto gaming is finally on the verge of making it to mainstream, I might reconsider and start blogging on blockchain gaming (almost) exclusively again. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!