From the massive fall of Bitcoin’s (BTC) price to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, 2022 was full of upheaval for the blockchain industry. But the blockchain community has always been resilient, finding new ways to develop in the most challenging times. A striking example of optimism and growth is the development of the GameFi industry, which combines gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse. In 2021, GameFi became a growth leader in the crypto space, with successful projects like Gala Games, Decentraland, The Sandbox and Axie Infinity. The GameFi sector has continued to develop, attracting more …

The casual gaming market will remain a crucial audience for blockchain games and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in gaming, according to three blockchain gaming company co-founders. Casual gamers, people who play games somewhat regularly but rarely invest significant time, make up the largest segment of players in the gaming industry. Kieran Warwick, co-founder of blockchain role-playing game Illuvium called casual gamers "critical" because of the sheer number of them in the population. There are more than 3 billion gamers worldwide as of 2023, and it's estimated that at least 1.95 billion are casual gamers, according to Exploding Topics. Warwick said gamers …

2022 was a huge year for the play-to-earn (P2E) gaming scene. An influx of capital and users was followed by a sharp downturn in blockchain game token prices and a decrease in players — and the market is still reeling. And, with fallout from the FTX disaster reaching into every corner of the industry, play-to-earn’s prospects seem bleak on the surface. But peeking under the hood, the numbers tell a different story: Strong funding this year has set the stage for serious “buidling” in 2023. A consistent flow of strong raises for Web3 gaming studios has been silently infusing the …

Final Fantasy creator Square Enix is set to double down on blockchain game development despite turbulence in the crypto market, according to a Jan. 1 letter from the company's president, Yosuke Matsuda. The letter, titled “A New Year’s Letter from the President,” aimed to recap the company’s major accomplishments in 2022 and explain its plans for 2023. Out of 15 paragraphs, seven were about blockchain gaming, showing that blockchain gaming is a major focus of the company’s investing strategy going forward. ⚔An introduction to SYMBIOGENESIS ①⚔ Starting from today we'll begin introducing Symbiogenesis, starting from the concept✨ Symbiogenesis is a …

NFT-friendly Japanese gaming giant Square Enix has invested 7 billion yen ($52.7 million) into game developer Gumi to create “high-quality” mobile games, blockchain games and a Metaverse initiative, among other things. According to a translated of the press release, the partnership will help Gumi tap certain intellectual property from Square Enix, while it has also teased that the duo could be teaming up for a game-NFT-focused marketplace. “We are already considering the establishment of a platform dedicated to blockchain games and an NFT marketplace, etc. Through collaboration between the two companies, we will provide a one-stop service from the development …

After a sell-out launch that pocketed roughly $4.45 million from primary sales, former United States president Donald Trump’s NFT collection is already on a crash course towards earth. Trump rolled out his odd-ball self-themed 45,000 NFT trading card collection on Dec. 16 for $99 a pop. The NFTs were all gobbled up within a couple hours of launch, and within the next two days the floor price shot up to an all-time-high of around 0.83 Ether (ETH), or $1,006 on OpenSea. Since then however, the floor price has been volatile, while some in the community have highlighted that the NFT …

Over the last decade, mobile gaming has become a consequential pillar of the interactive entertainment market. Thanks to access to smartphones, users the world over have been brought into the sphere of hardcore gamers. Now, the emergence of blockchain technology is creating a paradigm shift, offering players the ability to both truly own the assets they earn or buy in-game and the capacity to generate tangible value from their time spent playing. There are many opportunities that this new model can offer, but today, most of the projects available simply don’t live up to their legacy counterparts. This has led …

There is no substitute for experience. Even when an experience can feel regrettable, like getting your brother’s Runescape account banned. Robbie Ferguson grew up as an avid gamer, accumulating thousands of hours playing his favorite games. One fateful day, he logged into Runescape and set in motion a series of events that would forever change his view on digital ownership and the world of Web3 gaming: “I logged into my brother’s Runescape account which we shared and went into the wilderness and lost all his Red Dragon Armor. The next day, I felt so bad, I went and bought gold …

Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu believes nonfungible token (NFT) games are only scratching the surface of what's possible and predicts completely new models of gaming will be developed as a result of digital ownership. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Siu likened the potential growth of NFT gaming to mobile phone gaming, which started out relatively niche and clunky in its formative stages before rocketing to become the most popular method of gaming across the globe. “Mobile gaming brought a form factor of a type of game that we've never seen before, you know, one-hand play and that kind of stuff, and innovations …

User activity on blockchain gaming decentralized applications (DApps) surged in September, with a host of games posting significant increases in the number of active users. According to data from DappRadar, seven out of the top 10 games in terms of the number of “unique wallet addresses interacting with dapp’s smart contracts” increased over the past 30 days, with all of the top five games being in the green during that time frame. At the time of writing, the DApps registering growth in the period include Web3 gaming platform Gameta, and blockchain-based games Alien Worlds, Solitaire Blitz, Benji Bananas, and Splinterlands, …

What we have today in terms of Web3 gaming is not working. Play-to-earn has not worked and neither will play-to-earn or any X-to/and-earn. On top of that, traditional gamers view nonfungible tokens (NFTs) with suspicion. They dunk on expensive apes and are skeptical of large game publishers applying the lipstick of NFTs for further monetization. Nobody knows what a successful Web3 game will look like yet. To get there, we need more developers to experiment with more models. We need infrastructure that will lower the barriers to Web3 game development and make it easy for developers to experiment. That’s why …