Commitment, passion and belief in hard times
What we learned from Crypto Game Conference Kiev 2019
The six months since the previous Crypto Game Conference — held in Minsk, Belarus — have been packed with news, but nothing significant has changed in the world of blockchain games.
In the sector’s parlance, we’ve moved from talking about HODLing to actually BUIDLing; there’s so much BUIDLing.
There doesn’t appear to be too much strategic thought about why, however, which is reflected in the lack of AUNCHLing.
(If you’re confused, I just made that meme up!).
Whatever. It seems like the blockchain game section is stuck in a ‘jam tomorrow’ phase.
Adding complexity
The reason, of course, is making any sort of game is hard. Most quality games take at least 18 months to launch, and that’s before you try to add blockchain.
Given
(and Ethereum) rose to prominence in late 2017, any project that wasn’t in development prior, won’t be ready to launch until early 2020.Brutally stated, then, any blockchain game released now will be at best functionally lacking; probably just lacking.
This isn’t to put a downer on the sector. There are dozens of interesting projects in development and some are tiptoeing their way to some sort of decent beta playability.
The likes of
, ’s Crypto Space Commander and Light Trail Rush are gearing up on PC gaming platform Steam: that’s a key 2019 trend for blockchain games.Other anticipated games feeling their way towards consumers include the
virtual world and ’s TCG Gods Unchained.Show me the money
But 2019 has not seen substantive growth in blockchain users.
As Vlad Tomko of
pointed out in his excellent market overview in Kiev, some veteran games — Etheremon, Chibi Fighters — are now stalled through lack of funding.One key issue remains onboarding. Pointing out there are around 2.5 billion gamers globally, there are only around 40 million Ethereum wallets, of which Tomko estimated there were 175,000 users across all dapps, of which around 100,000 were active in some manner.
Personally, I’d be even less optimistic; the upper limit for gaming dapps is likely around 50,000 players. For some context, there are around 80,000 holders of crypto collectible CryptoKitties, but only a few thousand remain active.
(Let’s say 10,000 for the sake of easy math. We’re going to use this number later.)
Similarly, as we can see on DappRadar, when we look at more traditional gaming experiences, the four most popular blockchain games currently have around 3,000 daily active unique wallets.
(I did a deep dive into metrics in my talk on Finding KPIs to Measure the Success of Blockchain Games.)
Assuming a 50% crossover rate between these games, that’s around 6,000 active players. That’s the demand side.
On the supply side, Tomko reckons there are around 30 blockchain games earning some sort of revenue. Few, if any, are profitable. All depend on their investors’ money for ongoing operations.
Interestingly, however, he reckoned the sector’s gross revenue figures are larger than many will expect. Estimating around $300,000 of weekly revenue, that would scale up to over $100 million of annual revenue for all blockchain games.
Of course, the important factor is the majority of this is generated from the player-to-player trading of NFTs.
Not part of the conference but released during the same week, CryptoKitties tweeted its players had earned over $10 million from selling the Kitties they had bred. In this game at least, 73% of such NFT creation and trading volume isn’t ’t being captured by the game’s creators but shared by its community.
In contrast, popular user-generated platform Roblox has 100 million users and hopes to hand out $100 million to its creators in 2019.
Or put another way, Roblox is generating $1 per user per year for its creators. CryptoKitties — remember that 10,000 active player estimate — is doing more than $500.
Last of the true believers
And this is why the small band of advocates believe blockchain is going to revolutionize the games industry.
When players can create and capture the value of their games, things are going to be very different.
Belief in this radically new way of creating valuable gaming experiences percolated through the conference. It’s the thing keeping this nascent industry together, through the hard and harder times.
Developers aren’t making blockchain games because they are easy to make, or because they necessarily think they are more enjoyable games in terms of accessibility or user experience.
They’re certainly not in it for the money… now, at least.
No, there remains a firm belief that making games, which can’t be stopped, in which players own the gear and call the shots, is the right thing to do.
Scratch the surface of the founders of many of these companies and you hear stories of how they’ve been kicked out of games such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online or Counter-Strike: Go for doing things they felt to be justified as hardcore fans and players, but which were technically against the EULAs.
How many cycles of the Crypto Game Conference it will take to make this dream a reality, who knows?
What isn’t uncertain is we know history will prove us right.
$1 per player or $500 per player? You do the math.
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