Two key players in the web3 gaming space predict exponential expansion in the next few years.
Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of web3 gaming company Immutable, and Ryan Wyatt, president of layer-2 chain Polygon Labs, told TechCrunch+ that web3 will add the first 10 million to 100 million gamers within the next year or two.
“We’re going to see 40% of the web3 games [ever] built go live over the next 12 to 18 months, which will be a huge amount of attempts or shot-on-goal to have that 100 million players,” Ferguson added. If this prediction becomes true, it would represent a massive wave of adoption that the decentralized gaming industry didn’t have before.
On Monday, web3 gaming firm Immutable teamed up with layer-2 blockchain Polygon to help grow the scaling and adoption of the subsector. The collaboration will focus on making web3-enabled games faster to build, easier to use and less risky for larger gaming studios and independent developers to get involved.
“What we now are seeing is these games are being built to go live because games have a lead time of two to four years,” Ferguson said. “What’s required is incredible infrastructure for them to build an incredible customer experience where players can use this.”
“Over $100 billion are spent by players every year on in-game items,” Ferguson said, implying that the market for web3 games could be large. “This is not the box copy of Fortnite or the ability to download a game. This is literally [money spent on] skins, Candy Crush coins and costumes.”
But those assets are not ownable by players or, at best, are part of a gray marketplace, he added. “The opportunity here is to take a multi-100-billion-dollar asset class and make it truly ownable by players and make sure that the rights and the keys stick with them rather than a major third-party company.”
The only way web3 gaming scales is through true property rights, Ferguson thinks. “And if they have no idea how web3 works under the hood.”
New gamers in web3 don’t need to know how ZK-rollups or EVMs work because the vast majority of users are just going to employ a simple crypto wallet to receive and trade assets, Ferguson added.
The “most important” component for onboarding gamers and developers into web3 is making the consumer experience “completely invisible,” Ferguson said. The second biggest component is figuring out how to make economic playbooks that empower players but are also sustainable, he added.
“I think we’re going to have a very similar playbook to what happened to social gaming,” Ferguson said. Facebook-based games like Farmville, which had over 85 million monthly active users at its peak in March 2010, ended up getting cloned by other developers, Ferguson noted.
“This new paradigm of social gaming was created because they made it very, very easy for other people to make massively successful games using their own books,” Ferguson added. “I think that’s what we’re going to see in web3 economies this year: People develop sustainable economies that are very easy for game companies to replicate without churning a whole bunch of mental effort.”
As new alliances are rolled out to grow the web3 ecosystem, AAA gaming studios and traditional game developers are also drawing attention to the space, especially from Asia, the two noted.
The timeline to get traditional gamers and developers into web3 gaming will be slower in Western countries but will be a lot faster in Asian countries, Ferguson predicted.
“All great gaming trends” come from Asia, Wyatt said. “If you look at Korea, Japan and even China, I would say the West ends up adopting those gaming trends later. And some of the largest game publishers that sit in Korea, Japan and China are really excited about building blockchain games.”
For example, Square Enix, a Tokyo-based video gaming company behind big games like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy, partnered with Polygon last month to launch a gamified NFT collection. “We’ve got more [announcements] in the pipeline as well,” Wyatt said.
Over the next couple of years, Wyatt predicts that adoption from Western gaming developers will grow as game publishers in Asia — as well as web3-native game developers — are going to “change the game,” and “it’ll put a lot of pressure on Western game publishers to reevaluate their stance on it.”
As more and more developers adopt web3 technology, the market will grow, Ferguson said.
“This is just the next paradigm shift, but it’s a fundamental one,” Ferguson added. “The first mainstream web3 game is going to triple the user base of crypto overnight.”