Blockchain Games: What have we learned in 2019 so far?
Green shoots but how deep are the roots?
We’re a third of the way through a year many hope will be a turning point for the blockchain game sector, and what do we see?
Certainly sentiment has improved alongside the recent bump in cryptocurrency valuations, which itself is reinvigorating interest from VCs and other investors.
More significantly though, developers are raising their ambition when it comes to products, with new features coming to existing games and plenty of new titles in the works too.
The wider ecosystem is also thriving, especially in terms of activity to solve long-running pain points such as identity, wallet management, and onboarding. New mainnets continue to go live too, whether or not there’s demand for more blockchains.
And that’s the problem.
Much of this activity appears to be driven less by necessity than by the justification of garden-shed inventors and tech geeks everywhere — ‘Because We Can’.
Measuring success
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this. Experimentation for its own sake sits at the heart of many innovations and is indeed core to the radical nature of the whole blockchain experiment as formulated in the anonymous 2008 whitepaper that kickstarted the entire sector.
Where ‘Because We Can’ fails, however, is when it comes to building and sustaining a longterm business. A third of the way through 2019, it’s not yet clear how many blockchain game companies fully understand this.
Part of the issue is blockchain as a whole has attracted a motley mixture of technologists, enthusiasts, and snake oil salesmen. Combined with an incentive structure that rewards opportunists rather than traditional entrepreneurs, and perhaps it’s no surprise few people are looking beyond the constantly bubbling surface froth to see if there’s much substance beneath.
On that score, there is both good and bad news. There’s been sustained growth in the number of active wallets interacting with game smart contracts on the Ethereum network during 2019, which is as close as anyone gets to defining a player base in the blockchain sector.
Yet at around 6,000 active wallets on a daily basis, blockchain gaming is yet to experience its ‘hockey stick’ growth moment.
Tracking players and spending
Indeed some key games are suffering decline. EOS Knights could once claim to be most popular blockchain game, with over 7,000 daily active players. But since this peak in early March, player numbers have steadily dropped to around 4,000. Hardly the mark of a sector about disrupt traditional gaming.
Some individual games are slowly building their momentum, however. Despite its bewilderingly Japanese UX, My Crypto Heroes is now cemented as the most popular game on Ethereum with 3,500 players on a daily basis.
And almost 18 months on from its launch,
continues to demonstrate how to build community.Over 1.5 million kitties have now been created, the vast majority by the thousands of players who breed to create limited-edition fancy cats, and/or build up their collections and gain badges in the process.
Indeed, despite its relative age, CryptoKitties remains one of the most popular blockchain games in terms of player numbers, and is usually the highest ranked game in terms of the amount of money (or ETH) being spend within it too.
Mainly this is money spent breeding more kitties but also includes trading between players. Either way, CryptoKitties is the prime example of a blockchain-based economy in which a large proportion of the revenue being spent within the game is being transacted between players rather than pocketed by the developer, which in this case takes a mere 3.75%.
It’s not me, it’s you
And it’s not the only example. The CryptoKitties’-inspired
is doing something similar albeit with a small user base and much more complex gameplay (breeding and battling), and more complexity to come as it rolls out its longterm plan for persistence via its Lunacia universe.The potential of this approach is demonstrated in terms of the revenue individual players are spending; something that can be seen by working out the monthly Average Revenue Per Player.
Of course, as an average, plenty of complex activity and behavior isn’t being captured in such data.
But as a marker for how blockchain games could develop during the remainder of 2019, the fact some players are spending over $100, even $150, a month is a sign some developers have moved beyond Because We Can to Because That’s What Our Players Want.
And a third of the way into 2019, I think that’s progress.
