Reports said that games that use blockchain technology have increased their presence in the gaming industry. While there were early examples like CryptoKitties, launched in 2017, the trend has truly gained steam, with major gaming studios even exploring the technology.
It has been reported that at the beginning of 2022, the market capitalization of blockchain games was around $25 billion and it doesn’t seem to be decreasing anytime soon, even in the depths of a bear market.
According to the analytical service DappRadar, the two most stable areas this year in the cryptocurrency market are blockchain games and nonfungible tokens (NFT), which have recently become very tightly intertwined, creating a new economic phenomenon.
However, a striking example here is the well-known game Axie Infinity, the token price of which rose above $150 last fall, providing the project with a capitalization exceeding $9 billion. During the same period, the daily audience of the game was approaching 2 million people.
The report said that in December 2021, when Bitcoin began to fall from its record highs, the Axie Infinity token also began to sink, but the Axie Infinity audience grew to almost 3 million people a day, and the transaction activity in its network increased four times.
Likewise, there are objective reasons for such dynamics. Firstly, most blockchain games use browsers and the creators use HTML5 and WebGL technologies, which have radically expanded the possibilities for developing browser games. Such games repopulated browsers and, at the same time, provided the ability to connect crypto wallets and withdraw NFTs to external marketplaces without any regulatory restriction.
Secondly, blockchain games have no competition as such, as the traditional PC game industry still refers to the blockchain as an incomprehensible or even “toxic” space. This gives small studios, which are not yet able to create large gaming franchises, a huge head start on development.
The ability to quickly launch the in-game economy allows developers to immediately fund the continued development of their game worlds without getting into debt and without inflating working capital. Finally, blockchain games are mostly about income because in blockchain-based games players can earn money just by playing. For completing tasks and spending time in the game, users receive tokens that can then be invested or converted into real money.
Thus, massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) usually have a dynamic reward system where players get tokens by completing in-game tasks. Tokens are used to upgrade characters in order to gain an advantage over opponents in the form of a fortified arsenal or the development of character abilities. The most popular games in this genre are CryptoBlades, My Crypto Heroes and, of course, Axie Infinity.
Source: Cointelegraph