- “Crypto gaming” searches far outpace “Web3 gaming” on Google.
- Gaming cryptos currently comprise a market cap of roughly $20 billion.
- Play-to-earn gaming is running out of steam, according to industry experts.
Crypto gaming is on the rise as Google Trends analytics reveals interest levels not seen since 2021, despite a brief bearish moment for Web3 gaming cryptocurrencies.
Crypto Gaming Up
As the Google Trends graph shows (blue for “crypto gaming”, red for “Web3 gaming”), there’s a huge gap between the two, which has widened significantly over the past month.
Interestingly, searches for “Web3 gaming” have more or less flatlined, which suggests the ‘Web3’ label has failed to gain traction with mainstream audiences.
- Crypto Gaming searches soar above Web3 gaming. | Source: Google Trends.
Immutable’s Robbie Ferguson also noticed the uptick, which includes a notably solid performance from the gaming crypto market, stating that the sector hasn’t seen this level of interest since 2021.
Speaking with CCN, he posited that this momentum is coming from positive regulatory shifts in the U.S. thanks to the CLARITY Act and initiatives such as Project Crypto.
“From my conversations with multi-billion dollar gaming companies, there’s a clear shift in sentiment towards web3 gaming, and how effective it is in building sustainable ecosystems within games and lowering UA costs.
The impact is already showing at Immutable; in the last month alone, we’ve seen a 32% increase in MAU on Immutable Play as well as more than double developer inbounds.”
Per CoinMarketCap data, gaming tokens have had a bumpy month. After climbing to a $22.9 billion market cap, tokens took a nosedive amid bearish conditions, which saw this figure decline to a 30-day low of $17 billion.
- Gaming tokens market cap. | Source: CoinMarketCap.
However, this has begun recovering with market cap and trading volumes surging in the first week of August.
Ferguson also believes that stablecoins are also playing a big role in the market’s overall growth, noting that people are beginning to notice the “parallels of what stablecoin adoption, driven by Stripe, did for Payments, and what institutional momentum behind digital assets will do for gaming.”
“The entire category of gaming will be the next big thing to explode in crypto,” he adds.
The Quality Era
The Web3 industry has a habit of labelling everything it needs to define to the point it becomes a bit of a buzzword.
And the discussion around building ‘quality games’ first has – oddly – become a marketing necessity in this era.
It’s odd as the idea of games being of ‘good quality’ should be front and center.
However, it’s a very fragmented sector rife with an increasing number of failed titles, disappointing play-to-earn airdrop flops, and low-effort cash-grab games that are more investment opportunity/gamble than they are fun to play.
As a result, it almost became necessary to signal that upcoming/current titles like Star Citizen, Illuvium, EVE Frontier, and MapleStory N represent something entirely within the crypto sector.
And so, Web3 gaming, or as Google users appear to prefer, crypto gaming, continues to rise once again. Though perhaps this time around, it’ll be legitimized by the mainstream once and for all.
