Quite rightly, one of the fundamental criticisms of games using the blockchain is “When are they going to have scale?”
Sure, you’re using this funky decentralized tech, but if only 500 people can work out how to use it, so what?
It wasn’t that long ago that I too was asking when we’d see the first game to break 10,000 daily active users (DAUs).
But, actually during 2021, we’ve seen a couple of games break the 10,000, then the 20,000 DAU mark, and then keep on growing.
Indeed, at one point Alien Worlds peaked at over 400,000 DAUs before anti-bot measures dropped it back to its current level of around 200,000 DAUs (always assuming the ‘u’ for user is actually a ‘w’ for ‘wallet’).
Ironically, this particular trajectory is something I’ve stamped down on. Partly this is because Alien Worlds is an idle game that:
tacticly encourages real users to have multiple accounts, and
is clearly highly vulnerable to serious levels of botting.
Personally, I consider my opinion to be broadly correct; Alien Worlds has a lot of bots. But - equally - given that blockchain games are games in which players can extract financial value, maybe every bot is should be considered as sacred as a human player.
(A discussion for another email perhaps?)
However, there is another contender. Axie Infinity has also seen its growth exploding.
Strap yourself in
Of course, because everything in blockchain land needs to be complex, Axie Infinity’s on-chain activity remains fairly small; around 5,000 DAUWs.
But from the figures the developer is putting out on Twitter, the player base in terms of the game’s off-chain element - the actual battling part in which earns players the SLP cryptocurrency they can then sell off for local fiat currencies - has risen to over 200,000 DAUs, from less than 50,000 at the start of May.
Significantly, the majority of these are Android users (the thick green line) who access the game by sideloading the APK.
The game is not available through the official Google Play Store. Similarly, the small number of iOS users (I am occasionally one) are accessing via TestFlight.
As for the reason? That’s very clear: people are playing Axie Infinity because they can earn money.
Gaming = work
Alongside scale, this has always been another fundamental question for games using blockchain.
You’re using this funky tech in which every transaction, every digital interaction, has a financial value so clearly it has to be a Ponzi scheme, a scam etc.
Well, that’s easy for you to say from the advantage of well-paid employment in Europe or North America.
Instead, Axie Infinity’s growth has come from developing countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil. Right there, that’s 600 million people, lots of them earning less than $100 a week.
You don’t have to scroll down the Axie Infinity Twitter feed to see examples of people who have bought everything from bags of rice and PC monitors to motorbikes, houses or land just by playing the game.
Indeed, linked to this growth is the rise of Yield Guild Games, an organisation founded in the Philippines which loans out Axie NFTs to people so they can do just this.
To-date, it’s onboarded over 2,000 people to Axie Infinity and now is expanding to other mobile-focused games thanks to a $4 million funding round.
(It’s also launching its own governance token.)
It is about the money, money
Of course, skeptics will concatenate their arguments saying games using the blockchain are only gaining scale because people can earn money.
Personally, I totally agree.
The ability to earn money by playing games is a fundamentally and necessary corollary of what blockchain gaming is all about.
If I want to play the most polished match-3 game, the deepest FPS or the most exciting MOBA, I don’t want the friction and complication of blockchain anywhere near that experience.
But that’s not what blockchain gaming is; using a blockchain provides the ability for everything in a game world to have a financial value.
The challenge of the next 20 years will be finding novel ways of balancing this new financial opportunity with new forms of entertainment and new ways of building community.
Axie Infinity is certainly not perfect.
Instead, it is the best example we currently have of what full stack blockchain gaming (TM) can be and why it is so disruptive to the status quo, especially the somewhat snobbish attitudes of the hardcore western community that still struggles with free-to-play games.
This isn’t to ignore the issue of how blockchain games sustain themselves when their player base isn’t growing gangbusters, and NFTs valuations plateau etc.
Personally, I think - and am thinking hard - that the biggest challenge blockchain game companies will have to solve will be how to maintain their products’ long term economic stability.
But - realistically - this isn’t a problem most games using blockchains will have to deal with for years.
Instead, let’s just built it. I have absolutely no doubt they will come in their millions.