Key Points
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Within roughly one year, NFT gaming is on pace to overtake some of today’s most popular PC games.
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Compared with traditional PC games, only about ten titles are currently more popular than the leading NFT games.
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Blockchain and metaverse projects raised $2.5 billion in Q1 2022. With $4 billion raised across 2021, fundraising for the year could reach $10 billion if current trends continue.
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Although game token prices have plunged as the market expanded and then contracted, user growth and investment in the space remain robust.
With the market turning largely risk-off and many NFTs suffering sharp declines, I took a deeper look at the statistics behind what I consider one of the most compelling use cases for this new technology: gaming. While many NFTs are priced speculatively and have been hit hard by bearish sentiment, combining games and NFTs feels like a natural fit. Players invest substantial time and money into titles and in-game content, so defining ownership and tracking histories on-chain makes practical sense.
So how do the numbers stack up when comparing NFT gaming adoption to traditional gaming? And do user and investment trends suggest a more bullish long-term outlook than token price volatility might imply?
One-Year Growth
Growth in active users over the past year has been striking for NFT games. DappRadar’s report calculated a roughly 2,000% year-over-year increase in blockchain gaming activity during Q1. In the same quarter, blockchain games and other metaverse projects attracted $2.5 billion in funding. Even though that occurred before recent market weakness, it’s notable given $4 billion was raised throughout the strong market of 2021. Projected funding for 2022 could reach $10 billion—meaning even a significant reduction from early-year fundraising would still exceed 2021’s total.
NFT Gaming Users
The capital flowing into the sector is matched by substantial user numbers. The chart below showing the top 10 NFT games illustrates that this category is beginning to capture mainstream attention and is drawing increasing unique users each month.
To benchmark NFT games against traditional gaming, the closest comparable metric is active PC players. The chart below displays the top 10 most-played PC games on the Steam platform using average concurrent players over the past 30 days.
The following comparison assumes roughly 5% of active players are online at any given moment and overlays the most popular NFT games (in blue) against the most popular conventional PC games (in orange).
These comparisons show that while NFT games have not yet overtaken mainstream PC titles across the board, they are closing the gap quickly. For example, Alien Worlds—the top NFT game—has fewer users than only the top 10 PC games, and the margin between Alien Worlds and the lower-ranked PC titles is very narrow, on the order of roughly a thousand concurrent users.
Despite encouraging growth in user counts, critics point to the broader crypto market pullback and label NFT gaming a fad. Token prices for major projects such as Alien Worlds and Axie Infinity illustrate this concern: after explosive runs last year, their tokens experienced steep declines.
That said, focusing solely on token prices—largely driven by speculation—misses the other important metrics: accelerating user adoption and continued capital deployment into the platforms themselves. Those indicators present a more constructive long-term picture.
Even in a bearish market, blockchain gaming demonstrates a very real, potentially disruptive technology. For a sector so new to already be competing at the threshold of the top 10 PC titles is a significant achievement.
Are these tokens good investments at current prices? That’s a separate question for another time.
Sources
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1266486/blockchain-games-user-number/