December 27, 2022
By Anjali Kochhar
The past year has seen immense interest in blockchain games grow exponentially. While the two areas have been widely separated, some market players see an integrated future.
“I was around in the very early days of mobile gaming, right after the iPhone came out, the App Store came out,” Chris Akhavan, chief gaming officer at NFT marketplace Magic Eden, told TechCrunch.
“I remember the attitude back then amongst traditional gaming companies was that mobile games were stupid.”
These gaming conglomerates viewed mobile games as “really small, unimpressive games” that people wouldn’t want to play, Akhavan said.
“Largely, a lot of the big traditional gaming companies ignored mobile [games] for the first couple of years and that created opportunities for new mobile gaming companies like King, which is now owned by Activision, to create that margin and grow substantially.”
Several reports have surfaced in recent times showcasing an upward trend in the gaming-led metaverse market.
A report published by decentralized application (DApp) data aggregator DappRadar last week, the collapse of Terra in May was similar in scale to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
“It is becoming clear that the Terra debacle has become a Lehman brothers-like event that has sent shockwaves across the entire breadth of the crypto industry and aftershocks that will affect us for many months,” the report said.
However, the report noted that blockchain gaming and metaverse projects showed either minimal drawbacks or even positive signs of growth in the same period.
According to the report, DeFi and NFTs saw the biggest drops with 14.8% and 12.2% apiece, while blockchain games and NFT-related metaverse projects “managed to sidestep the ensuing bear market” by posting increases of 9.51% and 27% each.
While the average amount of activity from unique active wallets (UAWs) in NFTs dropped by a hefty 24% in Q2, blockchain gaming saw a drop of just 7%, suggesting that users continue to interact with gaming DApps “at a more or less the same rate as before the Terra incident.”
The trading volume for metaverse-related NFT projects was also described as a “beacon of hope,” as volumes increased by a whopping 97%.
Over the last few decades, new technologies have emerged and created economic opportunities. Two of them are online gaming and blockchain technology. In recent times, there has been a rise in online gaming platforms including blockchain technology in their ecosystem.
Some of these games are built in the metaverse while others are just play-to-earn games encrypted by blockchain technology for transparency.
About the author
Anjali Kochhar covers cryptocurrency stories in India as well as globally. Having been in the field of media and journalism for over three years now, she has developed a sharp news sense and works hard to present information that goes beyond the obvious. She is an avid reader and loves writing on a wide range of subjects.
