The concept of AI agents proved to be a damp squib in 2025 so will 2026 be the year they make a real impact on blockchain gaming?
Keith Kim, COO, NEXPACE
Skepticism around AI agents is understandable. In 2025, many projects adopted the “AI” label without a clearly defined problem or structural necessity, and approaches of that nature are unlikely to generate meaningful impact in 2026 either. However, from a longer-term perspective, particularly within increasingly sophisticated blockchain game economies, the role of AI agents converges toward being essential.
As in-game systems become increasingly dynamic, with prices, probabilities, and reward structures shifting in response to player behavior, managing complexities at scale eventually exceeds what manual processes and human intuition alone can support. In such an environment, the emergence of proactive AI agents that can interpret real-time on-chain and off-chain data and efficiently execute actions such as enhancement, exchange, or trading, represents a natural progression rather than a speculative leap.
An important point is that these AI agents are unlikely to settle as centralized features provided by the developer. Rather, there is strong potential for players and builders to create and share their own agents, extending gameplay into strategy and optimization rather than pure automation.
Naturally, this transition will not be fully realized within 2026. However, if tokenomic structures continue to enhance as they have in 2025, we can expect user-created AI agents to become meaningful pillars of in-game economies. User engagement with IP can then evolve from pure “play” toward analysis, strategy, and tool-building, contributing to greater scalability and sustainability within the blockchain gaming industry.
Rebecca Liao, CEO and co-founder, Saga
I would argue that AI agents were not a “damp squib” last year, but rather transitioning from novelty to infrastructure. Agents proved they could capture attention in gaming and entertainment by introducing a new interaction layer through characters that could speak in their own voice, guide players, and form persistent synthetic relationships. That level of engagement was very real, but what was missing was the economic continuity.
The limitation in 2025 was isolation, not demand. Agents could influence player intent, but they couldn’t transact, hold assets, or interact with a game economy. Whenever a player wanted to unlock an item, subscribe, or purchase, the agent had to hand off to legacy systems, breaking context and leaking value.
2026 represents a foundational shift as agents become participants instead of interfaces. On-chain rails, programmable assets, and yield-bearing value units enable agents to actually hold wallets, manage inventory, and act within a game’s economic logic. 2026 is the year agents gain memory, consequence, and economic agency.
Gabby Dizon, co-founder, Yield Guild Games
We still haven’t seen a good example of new, fun, innovative gameplay using AI agents. I think eventually someone will crack it, but we haven’t seen any of it up to now.
There are a few teams doing some interesting things. Like, Moku has its AI agent-based daily fantasy platform, Grand Arena, and Parallel Colony is a survival simulation game with AI agents – both are still in development. But for everything else I’ve seen, all of this “let AI manage the game for you” or “let AI run the game for you”… It just hasn’t been really incredibly interesting.
AI, like blockchain, is just a technology. You can’t just drop it into a game and expect people to care. People just want to have fun playing. That’s why things like stablecoins are becoming more important. They’re not the headline feature in a game, but they make payments simpler and improve onboarding. So stablecoins are actually solving problems for players, and they make the experience better. When the tech makes the experience better, that’s what works.
Hilmar Veigur Pétursson, CEO, CCP Games
EVE Frontier, at the heart of its framing, is about who will inherit the universe. Will it be our descendants or our creations? The Frontier is full of autonomous AI machines that have been evolving in space for millennia. These automata are the NPCs that human players must band together against and compete with for resources. In an onchain MMO like EVE Frontier, the presence of autonomous machines creates a much more unpredictable, volatile, and rich virtual world with real consequences.
From its backstory to its digital physics, we have designed a universe in which man and machine must battle to outlive the other. AI agents fit naturally here, and for our upcoming hackathon on Sui in March, we are making sure that these agents can populate the Frontier, bound by the same digital physics as human players.
Christina Macedo, CEO, PLAY Network
2025 turned AI into a personality trait. If you shipped an AI agent, you were suddenly a visionary. Trending. Investable. The result was a massive AI bubble where almost everything was labeled “AI” and very little of it was actually useful.
AI isn’t a trend at all. It’s infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, it only becomes interesting once everyone has access to it. Very soon, not using AI will make you irrelevant. 2026 is where the illusion breaks. This is the year AI stops being a headline and starts being a tool. Teams that know how to use it properly will move faster, build better, and operate cheaper. What gets overlooked is how radically this changes gaming.
One radical change is DATA: AI and AI agents are quietly becoming a developer’s most powerful data team. They make it possible to collect, process, and act on data at a level that used to require entire departments. Live events driven by player behavior. Smarter UA. Better balancing. Decisions backed by real signals, not gut feeling. All of it now accessible to teams that would’ve been locked out five years ago.
That’s the real disruption.
AI doesn’t reward the biggest budgets, it rewards the smartest use of information. It lets small teams punch far above their weight and forces large publishers to compete on something they’re not always great at: speed and creativity. In this environment, funding matters less. Fun matters more. 2026 will be remembered as the year AI stopped being impressive and started being expected, especially in gaming. It will also be the year data finally becomes central, not just to marketing, but to how games are designed, operated, and evolved.
At PLAY, we started thinking this way back in 2024. Not “how do we add AI?” but “what can AI see that we can’t?” That question shaped how we built our marketing platform and it continues to shape how we think about the future of gaming.
Sam Barberie, head of strategy and partnerships, Sequence
Agentic payments are a compelling opportunity in gaming because they reduce friction, unlock intelligent purchases and trading, and let software act economically and optimized on a busy player’s behalf. Games already outperform most e-commerce flows when it comes to conversion, but they still struggle with timing and complexity: too many items, too many currencies, too many moments where a player would have paid if the prompt arrived at the right time. Standards like x402 make it possible to set clear rules – budgets, item types, price ceilings – and let an agent handle the rest. That’s incredibly powerful in games, where missing a limited-time drop, forgetting to stock up before a raid, or mismanaging inventory directly impacts fun.
But despite how exciting this sounds, agentic payments aren’t ready for primetime. Even with blockchain guardrails that strictly limit what an agent can spend and buy, the idea of software autonomously moving money still makes people nervous – and for good reason. AI gets things wrong, and many games rely on friction and grind as part of the enjoyment, not something to be optimized away. Over-automation risks turning play into pure consumption, or worse, something that feels predatory rather than helpful.
For 2026, I see agentic payments functioning best as an assistive layer – watching prices, handling routine purchases, or acting only when explicitly instructed – rather than as a fully autonomous economic actor.
I also expect the biggest impact will likely show up in web2 gaming first, not web3-native titles. Web2 games already have massive audiences, well-understood economies, and centralized control that lets developers safely experiment with agent-driven purchasing. As users grow accustomed to agents managing spending across games – selling old items, preparing for new seasons, catching drops at 3am – the leap to more explicit web3 mechanics becomes far smaller, including more defi-like transactions. In that sense, gaming may be one of the cleanest bridges from traditional payments to agentic, onchain commerce.
Jack O’Holleran, CEO, SKALE Labs
AI agents have been making a huge impact on gaming, however, most of the success is unseen because they are operating behind the scenes in different ways.
First off, game devs are releasing content at a never-before-seen rate due to advances in AI coding. The speed at which a game can be built is dramatically faster than in the past. Also, small studios are able to compete even more aggressively as they can do more with less resources. Some of the most successful traditional games on Steam are now being built by very small teams.
Second, we are at the forefront of agentic commerce with the agent movement in technologies like x402 and AP2. Games will be a leader in agentic commerce due to their inherently digital nature and high-volume micro-economies.
This growth will not be without friction though. Game devs actively work to keep bots (ie agents) out of games. We need to see a new UX delivered that enables humans to play and agents to help with commerce, logistics, game strategy/advice to players, and then ultimately agents will participate in the buying, selling, and trading of in-game assets.
I expect to see AI agents step out from behind the scenes and jump to the forefront in 2026.
David Bolger, head of gaming and consumer partnerships, Offchain Labs
When it came to AI agents interacting with blockchains in 2025, there was a lack of fundamentals, with most of the substance being tied to just a Twitter bot and a token. In 2026, I think the impact from AI agents will come from the meta-game.
Agents are becoming personal digital managers, and they have evolved exceptionally since last year as we see with the recent Claude Cowork announcement. So I believe they’ll handle the admin like finding the best prices for loot, swapping tokens across different chains, or managing your digital assets while the user is served up a clean UX. The tech for this is here now, it’s more of an implementation and momentum problem right now.
I don’t expect many games to embrace the agent playing inside the game on behalf of the user, as that is akin to the botting world that developers try to suppress. However I do think AI agents will help make blockchain games feel like actual games again.
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