From young children to older adults, people love to play video games. Some play for hours on their mobile phones, while others spend thousands of dollars to custom-build the ultimate gaming PC. Either way, video games’ ability to connect people worldwide through play, cooperation and competition is readily apparent.

The rapid growth of the Web3 industry has presented another avenue for people around the world to connect and collaborate. It seems only logical, then, that these two worlds were destined to collide.

On the latest episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, host Jonathan DeYoung speaks with executives from five gaming-focused projects — Shrapnel, Ex Populus, Saga, HyperPlay and MetalCore — to get a comprehensive understanding of how Web3 games are being developed alongside the current state of blockchain gaming and its projected future. 

Web3 gaming won’t take off until games are frictionless

One theme repeated by many of the gaming executives is that Web3 games must have frictionless gameplay that can be enjoyed by both crypto fanatics and skeptics alike in order to go mainstream.

Marc Mercuri, chief blockchain officer of Shrapnel — an upcoming extraction shooter game — shared the perspective he and his team are taking with their upcoming title. “If I just want to play this game, and it’s great, I shouldn’t even know anything about Web3,” he said.

“But if I believe in DeFi and I want to bridge my assets in and out, and I want to get this skin and take it out and get a loan against it in a DeFi protocol and all the rest of that, you should be able to do that too.”

“If you just want to play a great game — and I think that’s what a lot of us want to do, is just bring this mainstream — you got to make sure that you’ve got the super-low-friction thing for folks to get started too.”

For players who do want to dive deep into the crypto ecosystem, it’s important that they can do so with ease as well. DeYoung asked JacobC.eth, founder and CEO of HyperPlay — a Web3-enabled games store that has an integration with MetaMask — about a recent meme that went viral in the crypto community on X where a user is playing a shooter and each shot taken prompts a MetaMask popup and requires a transaction confirmation. The meme was poking fun at the sort of friction that could theoretically come with blockchain-based games.

this is the future of gaming - every shot is on chain pic.twitter.com/eFavYC0t4D

— nick greenawalt (@motionbynick) May 15, 2024

According to JacobC.eth, onchain games can easily avoid this, such as by using account abstraction. This allows “the user to fund an in-game wallet and have their transactions automatically approved, or have them happen in the background up to the spending limits and thresholds that the user sets,” he explained. 

“Typically, most games just call the wallet when you are buying or selling an in-game asset,” JacobC.eth added. “But for the games that do have the logic onchain, like Pirate Nation or DeFi Kingdoms or Dark Forest, those games use account abstraction wallets to auto-approve the player’s transactions.”

Is Web3 gaming the key to crypto mass adoption?

On a recent episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, Animoca Brands co-founder and chairman Yat Siu shared his belief that gaming will usher in mass adoption. So, do other gaming executives share this perspective?

“We feel that if blockchain technology is really going to hit the mainstream, it’s number one going to be through gaming,” shared Toby Batton, founder and CEO of Web3 game studio Ex Populus. “Gaming obviously has a massive audience of billions of players around the world, and the use case of blockchain technology fits so perfectly with games.”

“Right now, the rocket ship is on the platform about to take off, and you can see the smoke roaring underneath it.”

Rebecca Liao, founder and CEO of Saga — a scalable layer-1 blockchain custom-built for game developers — agrees, but with some added nuance. “I do think that’s true,” she stated. “Is it the thing that has hit first? Obviously, no. I mean, we’ve seen that cryptocurrency as a product in its own right was the first to hit in Web3. [...] But in terms of true mass adoption — so people are on their phones using crypto, not noticing their crypto — that is all to come, I think. And that will come from gaming.”

In May, Liao told Cointelegraph Magazine that major game studios are already looking into blockchain but that it’s “very hush-hush” and mostly an “internal experiment.” She claimed that studios “don’t want to let their player base know that they’re working on this,” and that many gamers still believe “Web3 gaming is all a scam and full of terrible games.”

Related: Web3 and gaming: Unlocking real value for users

Liao is not the only one who believes it might be a while before we see massive AAA games incorporate crypto, despite the rumors. “I think what it’s going to take is a bunch of games like us and Shrapnel and others who are a little bit lower budget than AAA, a little bit more like AA, but are really good, high-quality games made by veterans that feel just as good as the AAA games,” argued Dan Nikolaides, chief technology officer of upcoming mech combat game MetalCore.

“Those need to just exist in the market long enough for the narrative of, you know, ‘Web3 games suck’ to go away. And there need to be just enough of these games that make it and that are successful and continue to demonstrate that quality games can come out of Web3 devs. And I think that’s when we’ll really get over the hump of mainstream.”

To hear executives from all five gaming projects share more about the promises of Web3 gaming as well as the challenges of reaching mass adoption, listen to the full episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph on Cointelegraph’s podcast page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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