Table of Contents
Main conclusions
For about a year now, NFT games have been on the verge of overtaking PC games in popularity Compared to conventional PC games, only 10 games are more popular than the top NFT editions $2.5 billion has been raised in PC games blockchain in Q1 2022 on course to $10 billion this year compared to $4 billion in 2021 While gaming token prices are in freefall alongside the broader market, user growth and investment Were Robust With NFTs falling apart as the market continues into full-risk mode, I decided to delve into the statistics behind an industry that I believe is one of the most intriguing use cases for this new technology. Of course, many NFTs are overpriced, which can be attributed to market hysteria, but I’ve always felt that the marriage between games and NFTs is a natural one. Players spend so much time playing certain games, as well as money on in-game additions, that setting ownership and keeping a historical record on the chain seems to make sense. So what do the numbers say about the adoption of NFT games compared to conventional games, and do they paint a more bullish picture than plummeting token prices?
a year of growth
In terms of active users, the growth over the last year has been meteoric for NFT games. A report by DappRadar calculated the growth in blockchain gaming at 2000% since the first quarter of last year. Also in the first quarter of this year, $2.5 billion was raised for blockchain games and other metaverse projects. While this was before the ugly downturn of recent months, it is still promising as $4 billion was raised in the entire year of 2021, a period when the bull market was in full swing. This puts game and metaverse projects on course to raise $10 billion by 2022. So even an extremely conservative 60% cut in funding would put it above 2021 levels.
NFT game users
Funding is robust, but so are users. A look at the chart below showing the top 10 NFT games confirms that the industry is starting to gain popular appeal and capturing more and more unique users per month. To put the above numbers in context, a good current reference for NFT games is PC gaming. The chart below shows the top 10 most played PC games on the Steam platform. While data on total users in a month is more difficult to obtain, the chart below presents the average number of concurrent players over the last 30 days (instead of the total unique users per month as shown in the chart above). Assuming 5% of active gamers are online at any given time, the chart below compares how NFT games stack up against the most popular PC games, with NFT games in blue and conventional games in orange. This shows that while NFT games still don’t outperform PC games, it is extremely close to happening. Only the top 10 PC games are capturing more users than the top NFT game, Alien Worlds, and the margin is very narrow, with Alien Worlds only having around 1,000 users behind. However, despite the bullish growth in numbers, these games are being branded as fads due to the general pullback in the cryptocurrency markets. Additionally, the chart below for two of the biggest tokens – Alien Worlds and Axie Infinity – shows that the freefall has been stark after explosive runs last year. But looking beyond the prices of such tokens (a large part of which would have been due to speculation) and instead looking at user growth and investment being put into these platforms, the future still looks bright. It’s a reminder that despite the bearish sentiment in the markets, there is a very real technology here that is making a difference and revolutionizing industries. Being on the cusp of the top 10 PC games is already a huge achievement given the nascent nature of space. As for whether these tokens are good investments at current prices? Well, that’s a topic for another day.
Sources
https://dappradar.com/blog/dappradar-x-bga-games-report-q1-2022 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1266486/blockchain-games-user-number/