Today we will take a look at coingecko’s web3 game industry report!
The Play to earn track started to explode in 2021. Starting from 2021, there will be more than 700 web3 games every year, and 3A masterpieces are constantly emerging.
A game may not be an immediate hit when it is released, but may become a hit later as the game itself or market conditions improve.
For example, Axie Infinity was actually released as early as 2018, but it really became popular in 2021.
Current game categories: RPG, card, shooting, farm, move to earn, strategy, sports, Yuan Yuzhen, pet training, Telegram games, etc.
Among the current WEB3 games, RPG games account for 20%, strategy games 13.7%, Telegram applets 13.1%, and Metaverse 12.5%. These four categories of games account for 60% of the market share of web3 games.
Telegram games also emerged in 2023, especially NOT, Hamster, etc.
From this data, we can see that the proportion of web3 games on the PC platform has been getting lower and lower. It could reach 40%-50% from 2017 to 2019, but now the proportion of PC in 2024 has dropped to 16%.
That is to say, current WEB3 games are either on mobile platforms or based on browsers. In fact, browser-based games are also suitable for mobile phones.
At present, more and more web3 games are entering the traditional game store - Epic Game store. In October 2024, 197 games were added to the EPIC Game store, while in January 2023, there were only 10 games. This number is an increasing trend, and most of the games here are multiplayer online or competitive games.
The top 15 most popular WEB3 games account for 50% of the market users, and the largest game currently has an average of 500,000 daily active users. This data is also a very impressive figure when placed on web2 games.
In October 2024, the current daily active number of web3 game users is 4.9 million. From the icon, we can see that especially since 24 years ago, this user data has skyrocketed. In fact, everyone should know the reason. During this period, a large number of Telegram games appeared, and there are a large number of users on Telegram. For example, Hamster said that it has 500,000 daily active users and 300 million total users, and NOTCOIN also has 30 million users.
In the past two years, among the top 15 most active games, only Alien Worlds, Pixels, Axie Infinity, Sweat Economy and Nine Chronicles have shown good resilience.
Looking at the game data displayed in the icon, the blue part has been growing very fast recently, and it is called World of Dypians. The white one is also growing very fast and is called SERAPH, while the green Pixel has declined. As for the first two games, those who are interested can study them. We may release 2 more programs to talk about them later.
This is the proportion of web3 games on different chains. The current active player base has far exceeded the peak of the previous cycle - about 2 million daily active players at the end of 2021.
The uptick in active players has been driven primarily by Ronin (since late 2023) and more recently by opBNB. Skale and Near have also seen significant player bases since late 2023.
Active players on the top five chains account for 63%, although the overall distribution is still long-tail, that is, the top 15 chains account for 90% of web3 games.
In 2024, the proportion of active addresses of these chains shows that WAX, Ronin, and Skale have the highest proportion of game addresses, which means that these three chains are built for games, while NEAR has the lowest. This is of course because NEAR is a comprehensive high-speed public chain, not only chain games, but also other applications, such as defi, infrastructure, wallets, various applications, etc.
Surprisingly, despite the popularity of Telegram mini-games, only 31% of active addresses on TON participated in gaming activities, and only 4% of on-chain transactions were related to games. This may reflect that these mini-games themselves do not use on-chain transactions extensively, and some mini-games may not be settled on the TON network.
In October 2024, the market value of web3 games was US$15 billion. On March 11, 2024, the market value of Web3 games reached an annual peak of US$3.22 billion, a significant improvement compared to US$610 million on October 1, 2023. 5 times growth, completing a strong recovery in just 5 months.
During this period, all Web3 gaming tokens from the previous cycle performed strongly, culminating in the listing of $RON on Binance. In addition, this cycle also introduced new tokens such as $NOT.
Web3 games are still a relatively nascent and small field, accounting for only 1.52% of the overall crypto market cap even at its peak ($39 billion). As of the end of October 2024, this share had fallen to 0.64%.
Although the report here says that the market value of web3 games accounts for a low proportion, I am still very optimistic, because first, the game field is very profitable in the web2 world. Second, chain games have been verified in the last round, so chain games will appear in any bull market in the future, and they will become more and more fun. Third, web3's chain games that play to earn will subvert traditional games!
Since 2021, $10 billion has been invested in web3 games, and in 2024 the game industry raised $780 million in financing alone.
While nearly $4 billion flowed into the Web3 gaming sector in each of 2021 and 2022, funding in the sector fell by about 70% to just $1.2 billion in 2023. Based on current trends, Web3 game funding in 2024 is likely to be close to or below 2023 levels.
Some of the largest financings this year include:
- Azra Games ($42 million)
- Parallel ($35 million)
- Gunzilla Games ($30 million)
- Balance.fun ($30 million)
Given that modern games typically take years to develop, funds invested in 2021 and 2022 are likely to wait for game products in their portfolio to be released before further deploying capital.
Finally, to summarize this report, although some chain games have been popular before, such as bigtime, ACE, not games, etc., but judging from this report, the overall web3 game has not yet fully exploded. Those who have experienced the last round of chain game explosion know how popular the last round of chain games was, so this wave cannot be so bad. After all, so many people and money have come in, so we look forward to the explosion of chain games in 2025. This round must exceed 50B.