Why blockchain games are ripping it up and starting again
Blockchain Gaming v2 is inbound
In many ways, nothing good has happened in the world of blockchain games over the past 12 months.
Crypto prices have crashed. Player numbers are static at best. Developers are struggling for funding. Sure, lots of new games have launched but no-one has done anything much new or exciting. The most anticipated games remain months away.
In other ways, however, everything is happening.
Conversations are ongoing, deals are being signed, strategies are being reworked, products honed, and the confidence finally punctured by mid-November’s pricing collapse is reflating.
In other words, the foundations are being laid for a brighter tomorrow.
Yet I don’t think it will be a brighter tomorrow for all. The brutal truth is that most of the companies currently struggling with funding, users, etc have had their chance.
Success in the era of the ICO and prolonged item pre-sale, the era of easy money for not much strategy and far less implementation, is over and it will take a herculean effort for most of those companies to reinvent themselves for the next set of challenges.
Because the big boys are coming to play in the blockchain game sector. All the companies we assumed were investigating the sector (but weren’t) are now more than interested.
Hard lessons not always learned
Partly this is due to other factors. This console cycle is clearly into its end game, while the five-year stock bull run for game companies has come to a sudden end too. Mobile games remains a growth area but aside from acquisition, most western game companies haven’t managed to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Throw into the mix, highly profitable Chinese game companies worried about their domestic growth and hardening legislation, and not to ignore another bout of interest in gaming from the likes of Google and Amazon, and this $140 billion annual market is looking ripe for a very big shake up.
Now, put in that context, the $200 million blockchain game market (2018 figures for all transactions) is small peanuts. And that’s why few of the current incumbents will survive. They just haven’t captured enough potential, let alone actual revenue, to make themselves interesting to these big fish.
Because unlike mobile games, where making mobile games and working out some basic F2P retention and monetization loops (alongside user acquisition), was the only edge required to build a substantial business, blockchain games are about to rip it up and start again.
Some things have worked to some degree. But most have not. And if you haven’t yet understood which is what, you haven’t learned enough to survive to the next stage.
