Traditional Gaming Market

Although blockchain gaming only makes up 0.5% of the total $336 billion gaming industry, large incumbents in the gaming space are already looking to adopt blockchain technologies in their games and IPs. Across the past year, traditional gaming markets have struggled to keep up with the pace and growth of blockchain gaming. Since the start of the pandemic, daily concurrent users on Steam have remained relatively consistent and reached a plateau. Conversely, blockchain gaming users have exploded from almost zero at the start of 2021 to over 8 million users by the end of 2022. Overall, as gamers become educated to the potential of blockchain gaming, and developers and publishers see the benefits of bringing their games to the blockchain, we should continue to see more traditional games make the transition. In the past few months alone, big names including EA, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Zynga, Square Enix and Gamestop have all publicly announced intentions to explore blockchain gaming, cementing the place of blockchain games into the future.

More broadly, the gaming industry has seen a pretty significant shift in recent years with mobile gaming overtaking PC and console gaming for the first time in 2021. With the continuing growth in mobile adoption and the advent of 5G ready technologies, we should expect to see mobile gaming continue to grow. Notably, mobile gaming is significant for blockchain games as a significant proportion of mobile gamers come from developing nations relative to PC and console gaming due to the greater adoption of mobiles compared to PC and console hardware. Because these nations are a key driver of blockchain gaming users, mobile compatible games will greatly benefit from this increased reach and have a far greater penetration. It is largely due to its mobile friendly development that Axie Infinity was so successful in countries like the Philippines and Venezuela, where the majority of players were on mobile.