Due to increasing market pressure, a growing number of web3 game developers have found themselves unable to raise additional funding, announcing they’re either discontinuing game development completely, pivoting to web2, building infrastructure, or something else.
In light of this trend, Aleksander Larsen’s talk given at Dubai Token2049 earlier in May, offered some intriguing sector insights.
Sky Mavis co-founder Larsen based his talk on learnings from the development and operations of Axie Infinity, a game he called the “most successful ever in web3”.
Indeed, he said that no game has managed to even get close to its success, although the vast majority of this activity occurred in 2020-2021.
in fact, much of Axie’s early growth was purely a matter of timing – it launched at a time of multiple “innovation triggers” coming to market, as Larsen described it, including the DeFi summer that was sustained by the airdrop of the Uniswap UNI token in 2020.
Although Larsen wouldn’t call it luck – he rather sees it as Darwinism playing out its natural course – obviously not every web3 game is going to have that kind of timing in their favour.
Moving on, he applied his Darwinian glasses when talking about the current struggles within the larger industry, saying that “The bright side of this is that the bad actors are being washed out”.
As for pinpointing the main problems with the current state of web3 gaming, he identified three key areas:
- Wrong focus on AAA games – “it takes too long to go to market”.
- No crypto-innovation – no plans on “how to keep players incentivized to keep playing and at the same time keep them holding on to their assets”.
- Too much money in the space, in fact “$15 billion”. This has been given to “the wrong developers”, not building anything of actual value, but just keep raising money, without truly innovating, according to Larsen.
In contrast, he highlighted Sky Mavis forthcoming project Atia’s Legacy as a bright example. When talking about what web3 games should focus on, Larsen boiled it down to gameplay and economy. Intentionally leaving graphics out, he said beautiful art direction is enough. AAA graphics will only get in the way and slow down the management of a sustainable game economy.
Through the same Darwinian perspective, Larsen also presented one of his favourite slides, showing the inevitable path of web3 game studios:
“So the cycle goes until we reach mainstream adoption.”
To get there, developers should also realise that distribution is key, he said, and concluded with the advice to not launch your game on a blockchain that relies on you onboarding the users, but “launch your game on a blockchain that’s already got active users.”
Presumable, he thinks they should launch on Sky Mavis’ Open Ronin network.