The blockchain gaming industry exploded into life a little over three years ago, as the wider crypto market embarked on one of its strongest-ever bull runs, driven by the rise of DeFi protocols and new innovations like NFTs.
Blockchain games emerged as a major growth driver during that period, attracting more than $4 billion in investment in 2021. Games like Axie Infinity were making headlines around the world, with players reportedly earning hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. The value of Axie NFTs – required to play the game – in particular went through the roof, with some selling for over a million dollars.
But just as quickly as blockchain gaming caught the attention of the masses, it suddenly lost its footing. With the onset of crypto winter in early 2022, followed by the news of a major hack on Axie Infinity’s servers, this nascent Web3 industry segment quickly went downhill. NFT prices collapsed and players exited the games in their droves, leading to serious questions about the long-term viability of “play-to-earn” gaming.
Blockchain games were widely panned by traditional gamers, with one survey by Coda Labs of more than 7,000 regular video games players highlighting an incredibly negative perception of the concept.
The challenges in blockchain gaming were myriad. The major problem in the industry was a lack of quality gameplay experiences. The vast majority of blockchain games developers were focused on monetization and token prices rather than the actual quality of the games they made. There were barriers to adoption for traditional gamers too, with the need to create digital wallets and a crypto exchange account to be able to trade the tokens they earned. Moreover, many blockchain games suffered from poorly-thought out tokenomics models, often called out as “Ponzinomics’, which leaned too heavily on new users joining to keep pumping in more money into the game. Of course, Ponzi schemes are known to be unsustainable in the long term, and any game basing its tokenomics design on such a model is ultimately destined to fail.
A New Approach
Although the blockchain gaming sector collapsed, the movement didn’t fade away into obscurity as many had predicted. Despite going through some struggles, the concept of play-to-earn is alive and well, and attracting renewed interest from investors. A report by DappRadar shows that blockchain games were able to raise a combined $988 million in venture capital in the first three months of 2024, breathing new life into the sector.
Does that mean blockchain game developers are finally taking on more established and traditional AAA games such as GTA, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon and Fortnite?
Not exactly, but they are making better games than they did before. The vast majority of blockchain games developers tend to be indie studios that lack the funding of mainstream games developers like Rockstar Games and Epic Games. They don’t have the budget to create titles that can compete with the most popular video games franchises in the world today, but they don’t have to either.
Rather, what they have done is focus on building more enjoyable games that resonate with specific niche audiences in the gaming community. For instance, The Six Dragons is a play-to-earn game that has gone down very well with the fantasy world RPG community, even if it doesn’t quite match the likes of Starfield, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and The Legend of Zelda
What the new breed of blockchain games have done is to shift left and focus on the mainstream appeal of their games, such as the storyline, gameplay, graphics and user interface. By improving the storytelling narrative and the visuals, blockchain games are now much more able to attract the interest of the world’s 3.1 billion-strong gaming community. The tokenomics of modern blockchain games is now more of an afterthought, and many new titles don’t even require players to own an NFT to access the basic version of their game.
Doing this means putting things like the game’s token launch on the backburner. Developers now understand that they shouldn’t even start thinking about the actual token of their game until they’re sure that the gameplay itself is enough to attract and retain players. They’re building communities first and ensuring they have enough players to support an in-game economy prior to the actual token launch.
Transparency Garners Confidence
Blockchain games are also making progress by building more sustainable models and by offering greater transparency into their plans to show what they’re doing has legs, and is not just an alternative Ponzi scheme.
The roadmap has become a key element for every successful crypto project, laying out its developmental journey and future plans, charting key phases and detailing forthcoming updates that will bring it closer to its publicly stated goals.
Roadmaps can go some way towards convincing games that they’re backing a serious project. Most blockchain game roadmaps offer some kind of timeline that highlights key upcoming milestones, such as the launch of their testnet and mainnet, and the roll out of new features, game modes, tokens and so on. They tend to delve deeper into the project’s short-term aspirations, and provide clues about its target audience and where the game developers see it going in the longer-term.
A roadmap, also called a cryptocurrency project roadmap, is a high level document of a cryptocurrency or blockchain project’s developmental journey, product strategy and future aspirations. It meticulously charts out pivotal phases of a project, complete with planned actions and deliverables for each of these phases. In doing this, a roadmap helps to engineer confidence among potential gamers and investors, reassuring them that the development team has a well thought-out plan to advance the game in the future.
Due to their nature, roadmaps have to evolve over time to show how the game in question is progressing towards its goals and establishing new ones as advances are made.
The popular space exploration and resource extraction game LandRocker epitomizes this concept with its newly launched dynamic roadmap, which transforms the way blockchain games can communicate their progress. It’s essentially a living document that details all of the various initiatives LandRocker’s development team is working on, as well as those that are in the works. Along with a video explainer of each item on its roadmap, LandRocker also updates its roadmap every day, keeping track of each planned update, whether it’s a new token listing, an improvement to the game’s graphics, new gameplay features, non-playable character development or something else.
LandRocker’s dynamic roadmap ups the level of transparency in the development of Web3 games, creating a stronger bond between its developer team and its extensive community of players. By allowing players to track its progress and show how it’s working to build something sustainable and ultimately much bigger and better than it is now, LandRocker wins the trust of its community and increases confidence in its long-term health.
It’s a pivotal development that other blockchain games are sure to borrow, and it’s paired with a sound tokenomics model that fosters a more sustainable gaming economy and stable economic loop. LandRocker’s tokenomics structure was refined following billions of simulations to ensure that players will continue to earn rewards over the long term, without any risk that its in-game tokens will lose value over time.
By creating a transparent, up-to-date roadmap, blockchain game developers have a way to proactively strategize and ensure they can allocate sufficient resources to achieve all of their goals, both in the short-term and the long-term. In turn, this fosters even greater confidence among the game’s stakeholders.
Charting A Sustainable Future
It’s clear by now that blockchain will never be the major selling point for traditional gamers, and that is the audience that Web3 games must win over if they’re to make their mark on the gaming industry in future. For their target demographic, what’s more important is the quality of the gameplay, the storyline, the UX, and the look and feel of the game. The NFTs and the tokens and blockchain itself are all just an afterthought, and that’s precisely how it needs to be.
By hiring Web2 gaming talent to make sure their games appeal to traditional gamers, building games with a proper focus, and offering greater transparency, blockchain games are already on the rebound. The new generation of blockchain games promises to be more sustainable and longer-lasting, and that will help to ensure they remain relevant for far longer than the first wave of play-to-earn games.
Blockchain gaming has learnt the hard way and it’s bouncing back, building more sustainable games that can go on to become a big part of the Web3 ecosystem.
