What’s the problem with — Blockchain Games?

Episode 1: The heart of the matter

Welcome to What’s The Problem With?, our regular, irrelevant stress test of the blockchain game sector.

Apparently there’s a new big thing happening in the world of games; it’s called blockchain games.

But there’s a problem. There aren’t any blockchain games.

The example everyone points to is CryptoKitties, which — as the name suggests — is a Ponzi scheme in which you swap Ether for a picture of a cat.

Where’s the game in that?

Launched around the same time Bitcoin and Ether’s value against the dollar spiked beyond any rational view of irrational exuberance in late 2017, CryptoKitties has struggled to prove it’s anything other than an illiquid crypto investment, albeit one in which the vast majority of people who have traded a CryptoKitty have lost money.

Sensibly, two-thirds of the 75,000 people who have bought a kitty have done zilch with it, but maybe that’s because they can’t remember their MetaMask log-in as the fat, wet tears they’ve been crying even since Bitcoin went sub-$10,000 has smudged their crayon password reminder.

Show me some scale

Of course, there are plenty of other game developers touting their new blockchain games as the next big thing for the new big thing.

The only problem is with Bitcoin prices about as buoyant as a CryptoKitty thrown overboard in a lead box, no-one other than the hardcore true believers care. So even if any of these new games is blockchain gaming rocket fuel, there won’t be enough players to fill a battle royale island, let alone a server modelling a deep space trading solar system.

Which is a big problem, because if no blockchain game can even make it off the launchpad, let alone half way to the moon, then what happens to the rest of the blockchain gaming sector that so often touts its ability to disrupt the +$100 billion games industry?