According to WAX co-founder and CEO William Quigley, traditional ideas about games, coming both from the companies that develop the games and from gamers themselves, could be slowing down the adoption of Web3 games.
Speaking to Cointelegraph during a Web Summit panel in Portugal on Nov. 3, Quigley said “trying to make a video game using blockchain is a pain in the ass,” noting that many products in the market are browser-based but use in-game digital assets on the blockchain. The WAX CEO added that non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have given indie developers an in-game advantage, allowing them to pre-sell and raise necessary funds.
“For the most part, people who build [blockchain-based games] today are independent game developers,” Quigley said. “The big triple-A video game companies haven’t adopted it yet, and probably for good reason – they don’t know what the revenue model will be; they don’t know how it’s going to change their game.”
He added:
“I actually think the first big games that have several million persistent users every day – those will come from new start-up studios. I doubt they’ll come from the traditional video game market.
Also on the Web Summit panel, Gamee co-founder and CEO Bozena Rezab said that NFT presales may offer some benefits, but they have the potential to “trap” developers by putting them in a binding relationship with players looking for a certain product. Quigley said many mainstream players “don’t support NFTs” to “pollute[ing] the game” – something that could slow down companies looking to adopt blockchain-based games.
“The biggest sort of thing on the horizon that could allow blockchain-based games to take off would be augmented reality, virtual reality,” Quigley said. “When that happens, I suspect the main revenue model for AR, VR games is going to be something like a tradable item, an NFT or whatever we’ll call it. I think that’s going to be the next big jump in numbers of users.
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As the crypto and blockchain space continues to grow, the number of options available to users interested in integrating the technology into their favorite games is also growing. SupraOracles reported that the market capitalization of the top 5 gaming tokens was around $25 billion in February, with the total gaming market expected to reach over $583 billion by 2030.