- Moonbeam launched in 2021 and rebranded in 2024 to drive more focus towards becoming a Web3 hub.
- Web3 games are beginning to prioritize competitive play over speculative assets.
- Moonbeam’s gaming transaction volumes have grown 149% in Q1 2025.
The Web3 gaming industry is evolving away from speculative assets and tired play-to-earn (P2E) models, and is targeting high-quality games and longevity.
Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain, hopes to deliver on this with the rollout of its Gaming Hub. CCN spoke with Sicco Naet, Moonbeam’s head of ecosystem development, to find out more.
Competition Matters
Since their inception, NFTs have been touted as a genuine game-changing technology, and they still are. However, many games put the cart before the horse, offering in-game asset ownership with NFTs on top of an average game.
As Naets explains, the hub was born from his belief that “much of Web3” is taking the wrong route in its attempts to bring blockchain to the mainstream.
“So much of the narrative seems to be around ‘true ownership of assets,’ i.e. the notion that via NFTs, you can truly own and trade your in-game assets and that this can be a main selling point to traditional gamers.”
Ultimately, many of these games incentivized the wealthiest of players to buy the best in-game assets they could, making many of these titles pay-to-win.
“To me, this argument falls flat—I was an avid World of Warcraft player and I lived through the rise of professional gold farming outfits in the late 2000s, first in WOW and then in other MMOs. They were almost universally reviled because their arrival so distorts the in-game economy and creates an environment where the people with the biggest real-world wallets end up gaining advantage.”
The average gaming audience doesn’t have a lot of money, Naet notes, and the escapism and power fantasy experience of gaming is stripped away when developers introduce elements that distort the experience and allow people to pay their way to the top.
“Some of web3 has tried to pivot to cosmetics, but on the one hand a lot of gamers don’t care much about cosmetics and on the other hand, that already exists in web2 games. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say “You know, I really wish this fancy outfit was on blockchain.”
For Naets, it’s about leaning into the inherent competitive nature of video games instead of luring players in with value-bearing assets. Gamers still want the experience to “mean something”, and having competition over something of value, regardless of size, makes a game a lot more compelling.
“It’s why some of the best stories came out of a game like EVE Online, where an upstart corporation blew up an established corporation’s $13,000 capital ship. It’s why people organize poker nights where participants play for $2; it’s not because they’re hoping to get rich off the gameplay, it’s because people are putting skin into the game and the winnings become a trophy.”
In Naets’ view, Web3 is “uniquely” positioned to bring such ambitions to life through its infrastructure, as well as offering an easy on and off ramp for players to stake and claim rewards.
Web3 games such as Cambria are pioneering a growing movement amongst developers to create highly competitive and incentivized game loops that reward a player’s ability and skill above all else. Upcoming titles, such as EVE Frontier, will take this a step further by giving players seemingly unlimited ways to play and compete for survival.
Quality Over Quantity
Looking beyond genre and incentive, Moonbeam wants to list games that have “interesting stories” with “layered lore” that can keep players coming back.
For Moonbeam, it’s all about quality. They don’t want to onboard hundreds of games just for the sake of saying “we have hundreds of games live” and not be able to effectively support their development and growth.
“Rather, we provide a curated mix of the games we think are the best and then double down to make them successful.”
Naets, a sucker for RPG games like World of Warcraft, tabletop games like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, makes particular mention of Moonbeam gaming hub RPG, Evrloot.
“The Evrloot team has done an amazing job creating an engaging world with a deep lore, and they’re continuously adding to and expanding the game.”
Gamers will always be looking for something new and innovative to play. As Naets explains, Call of Duty has so many iterations that he can’t tell them apart anymore. Furthermore, Naets views the indie game space as the one where “true innovation” happens.
“In terms of the most creative idea I’ve come across, I would have to say Kugle. The game is not yet live, but they’ve built an interesting blend between a pet-grooming game (à la Pokemon or Tamagochi) and an absolutely insane multi-dimensional racing game.”
Anyone can apply for the dev grants, but Moonbeam is keeping an eye out for high-quality teams interested in a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship with a minimal viable product (MVP) that can be demoed on a live call.
Building the Hub
Gaming has always been a focus of the firm, “even in the early days,” Naets says.
Founded in 2020, Naets joined the Moonbeam Foundation in 2021, and worked across numerous areas before his extensive gaming experience, as well as being a software architect, made him a well-qualified advisor for studios launching titles on Moonbeam.
Major investments in gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi), namely N3mus and Sequence, cemented Moonbeam’s new direction following its 2024 rebrand, and now its hub serves as a “one-two punch” for developers looking to build and gain traction.
First, it has the GameBuilder (built by Sequence). This gives studios a complete solution to quickly migrate to Moonbeam with a shallow learning curve. Naets describes it as a “world-class solution” for integrating Web3 “painlessly” into existing games.
He explains that devs can build on its all-in-one Web3 dev stack, which is a powerful tool for teams new to Web3 game development. Furthermore, Web3 tech brings new complexities to dev teams, which can draw away from the harder part of the whole process, building a great game.
“I think a clear example of how well this works is the integrations of both Olderfall and Data2073. Both teams deployed to Moonbeam within a matter of weeks after we talked to them; the integration was seamless and they had tournaments up and running in under a month, with tens of thousands of games played within the first couple of weeks of go-live.”
Then, it has the GameHub and GameTournaments launched in collaboration with N3mus. These do exactly what you think they do. The GameHub lists deployed titles alongside others to give players quick access to new games.
The Tournament system turns up the heat on the competition with weekly tournaments with small cash prizes across many of the games running on Moonbeam. It also gives players an incentive to test out new titles.
“The basic premise is pretty straightforward: as long as the game has the concept of a score—and a score could be anything from xp in a role-playing game to bananas collected in a platform game to battles won in an auto-battler—and the score goes on-chain, N3mus aggregates the scores into a leaderboard.”
N3mus always has “missions” akin to daily quests, giving players some additional ways to gain xp percentage boosts through social media interactions, owning a certain NFT, or even burning a meme token, “there are lots of options here,” Naets adds.
“Some of the games have struggled with the influx of additional traffic and growth at times, and while people let us and N3mus know when things aren’t working, they’ve been very patient and understanding. Overall, the vibe has been extremely positive.”
To maintain a healthy competitive scene, the team actively tracks tournament performance to detect cheaters and works with the respective teams to “keep things honest.”
“We can’t fully go into all of these as you can imagine that this is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, but they have techniques for detecting when people are account sharing or trying to modify the game client to gain advantage,” Naets adds.
The Road Ahead
The modern gaming industry is known for its many boom and bust cycles, commercial flops, and critical failures.
It’s a cutthroat industry that, in its Web3 form, has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of studios and developers fail to capture an audience.
“As I mentioned before, I don’t think it lies in ownership of assets. I think competition over assets of value and possibly governance over game mechanics are more promising avenues, so we are heavily leaning in that direction.”
With titles such as Immutable’s AAA game, Star Atlas, and Gunzilla’s Off the Grid, Web3 gaming is carving out a fresh path for mainstream players, offering fun, playable games bursting with potential.
But Naets says that people easily forget that indie games are the trend setters. For example, PlayerUnknown’s: Battlegrounds (PUBG), started off as a mod for Arma 2 before being published by a complete unknown as a standalone game.
“If you asked me to place a bet, I would say that it’s going to be some small studio that no one has ever heard of that really breaks open the field and that everyone then tries to copy.”
In the wake of PUBG came Fortnite, Warzone, Apex Legends, and others that wanted to replicate the groundbreaking battle royale genre.
Looking ahead, Naets expresses optimism in the Moonbeam Hub becoming a “best-of-breed” example for the industry. In that same vein, Naets looks forward to the copycats and knock-offs of its gaming library, because “imitation is the greatest form of flattery.”
