What will happen when a bear market hits blockchain gaming, a sector that hasn’t really seen a downturn before?
The most obvious game to look at is the market leader, Axie Infinity, the game of teams of cute playable characters battling it out much like Pokemon.
“Right now I am realizing the Axie family is extremely strong. It’s not going to go away,” Ben Heidorn of Blockade Games, the company behind the NFT-powered game Neon District said Thursday at NFT.nyc, the digital collectibles conference that ran from Nov. 2 to 4 in New York.
Bear Market
If there’s a bear market coming to crypto soon, as many expect, Heidorn said no one really knows what the impact will be on blockchain games that have made so much progress in recent years. He predicted that the most popular blockchain game so far will weather it successfully.
That reflected the general bullish sentiment of the play-to-earn panel on the last day of the conference. As digital items in games grow in value, the panelists predicted that gaming is going to make the global economy adapt to it, from driving up the global notion of a minimum wage to igniting economies in the developing world.
Heidorn shared the stage with Jason Chapman of Konvoy Ventures and David Zastrow of Axie Infinity, on stage in the Palladium Theater, one of the several venues in which NFT.nyc took place.
Game Monetization
Play-to-earn is a new way to monetize video games enabled by cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. In its purest form, creators can release a game that has in-game items and currencies that players earn and can be traded outside the game either for other items or for cryptocurrency.
If a game is good enough, that drives value for those digital assets, which makes the creators’ own treasuries go up in value, making it worthwhile to build the game in the first place.
Across all these games, “The end goal is the same, to give people a means by which they can change their own lives,” Heidorn said.
100x
These economies are going to evolve fast, the panelists agree. “Play-to-earn in Axie or Neon District is an experiment,” Heidorn said. We are not going to be able to foresee the many ways that the economics of games like these shift over time as this sector becomes more popular.
Zastrow estimated that the current size of the decentralized gaming space is 2.5M players, predicting that people in places like South America and Africa would soon discover blockchain gaming, expand the base of players and quickly become leaders in the industry. Chapman estimated that the next few years would see 100M players.