The blockchain gaming industry has turned into a “game of musical chairs,” with no fresh capital flowing in — just the same money cycling through different gaming projects, according to a blockchain gaming executive.
“There is no new money coming into the system,” Gunzilla Games Web3 director Theodore Agranat told Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong.
Existing capital is being shuffled around
Agranat said “existing capital” is just being recycled between gaming projects, with no new value entering the system.
“I would say it’s also a little bit of a game of musical chairs,” he said.
Agranat pointed out that daily active wallets (DAW) in blockchain gaming have fallen from “around 10 million last summer” to 7.5 million today, with roughly 70% of Q1 2024 growth driven from airdrop and farming campaigns.
Analytics platform DappRadar named Q1 2024 the “play-to-airdrop” era, highlighting blockchain games like RPG game Kuroro Beasts, fighter game AI Arena, and card strategy racing game MixMob as notable games with significant airdrops over the quarter.
Agranat said that users were artificially creating multiple crypto wallets and engaging with games solely to collect airdrops, a method he said is “totally unsustainable.”
“They will just go from project to project and extract whatever value they can from that project. And once there’s no more value to be had there, they are going to move on to another project,” he said.
No loyalty in blockchain gaming
“These are not long term like clients or users of your project or your product,” he said.
“They are professionals and professional folks that, in many instances, are just speculators that want to make a return on the investment,” he said.
Related: Illuvium CEO says firm has gone ‘super lean’ to speed up development
Meanwhile, more recently, blockchain gaming in January saw a threefold increase in onchain activity compared to the same time a year ago, according to DappRadar.
Web3 games saw over 7 million unique active wallets (UAW) a day last month — a 386% increase compared to January 2024.
Magazine: Web3 gaming activity surges 386% — Wen bull run? Web3 Gamer
