NFT games on brink of overtaking PC games in popularity

key takeaways

Within almost a year, NFT games are now on the verge of overtaking PC games in popularity
Compared to traditional PC games, only 10 games are more popular than the top NFT versions
$2.5 billion was raised by blockchain games in the first quarter of 2022, certainly for $10 billion this year, compared to $4 billion in 2021
While gaming token prices have declined along with the broader market, user growth and investment has remained stagnant.

As the market continues in full risk-off mode with NFTs crumbling, I have decided to dive into the statistics behind an area that I believe is one of the most intriguing use cases for this novel technology. Is.

sure, many NFT There are high prices and this can be attributed to bear market frenzy, but I have always felt that the marriage between gaming and NFTs is a natural one. Players spend so much time playing certain games, as well as investing money in in-game additions, that it makes sense to define ownership and maintain a historical record on-chain.

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So what do the numbers say about NFT gaming adoption compared to traditional gaming, and do they paint a more bullish picture than freefalling token prices?

one year increase

In terms of active users, the last year’s growth for NFT games has been meteoric. a report good DappRadar calculates a 2000% increase in blockchain gaming 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 came before the ugly downturn of recent months, it still looks promising, with $4 billion raised in 2021, a period when the bull market was in full swing. This puts the gaming and metaverse projects on course to raise $10 billion by 2022. Therefore, even a massive 60% cut in funding will keep it above 2021 levels.

nft gaming users

Funding is tough, but so are the users. A look at the graph below showing the top 10 NFT games confirms that the sector is starting to gain mainstream appeal and is catching more and more unique users per month.

To put the above numbers in context, a neat current benchmark for NFT games is that of PC games. The graph below shows the top 10 most played PC games on the Steam platform. While it is more challenging to get data for total users in a month, the graph below presents the average number of concurrent players over the past 30 days (instead of the total number of unique users per month as in the graph above).

Assuming that 5% of active players are online at any given time, the graph below compares how NFT games stack up with the most popular PC games, with NFT games in blue and traditional PC games in orange.

This suggests that NFT games have yet to overtake PC games, but it is very 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 closing in on only 1,000 users.

Yet despite the rapid increase in numbers, these games are being branded as a fad due to the overall pullback in the crypto markets. Furthermore, the graph below for the two largest tokens – Alien Worlds and Axi Infinity – shows that freefall has increased significantly after an explosive run-up last year.

But given the prices of such tokens (a large part of which would have been due to speculation) and instead user growth and investments in these platforms, the future still looks bright.

It is a reminder that despite the bearish sentiment in the markets, there is very real technology here that is making a difference and disrupting industries. Considering the nascent nature of space, being on the verge of top 10 PC games is already quite an achievement.

As in, are these tokens a good investment at current prices? Well, that’s another day.