Top Web3 vs Web2 Games Statistics (2023)

Top Web3 vs Web2 Game

The top web3 game Alien Worlds currently only has 1.9% of the number of players on Minecraft, which is among the most played web2 video games ever. In 2023, for every 1 Alien Worlds player, there are at least 51 Minecraft players.

Alien Worlds, a space exploration game that uses NFTs and tokens to simulate an economy, recorded a daily average unique active wallet (UAW) count of 230,978 in April. UAW is the web3 gaming metric for measuring an estimated number of players. In comparison, the sandbox game Minecraft had on average up to 11,900,543 people playing at the same time, in a day.

This significant gap in the number of players shows that the blockchain gaming sector is still at a very early stage – even the most successful web3 game has not yet captured a meaningful share of the gamer audience and gaming market. 

Given that web3 games are not seen as serious threats yet, the leading traditional video game companies have had mixed positions on blockchain adoption. On one end of the spectrum, game distributor Steam banned NFT games on its platform, while on the other end, Epic Games has published a number of crypto games.

Most Popular Web3 vs Web2 Game

Axie Infinity might be the most popular and well-known web3 NFT game, but for each Axie Infinity player, there are as many as 2,155 Roblox players. This puts into perspective the difference in reach and sustainability of web3 games that become popular, compared to web2 games.

Even at its peak in late 2021, Axie Infinity only reached up to 485,943 daily average UAW, despite being the pioneer that brought mainstream attention to NFT games.

The decline in the number of Axie Infinity players reflects that the play-to-earn (P2E) model, which first generation web3 games were heavily focused on, is not a healthy or effective incentive to drive crypto adoption among gamers. 

What is the Growth Potential of Web3 Games?

Web3 games have the potential to grow hundreds of times their current player count. To give an illustration, the number of people playing top web3 game Alien Worlds can grow by 103X, if it is able to become as widely-appealing as Roblox.

Notably, the current top 20 web3 games in 2023 does not include any games that are primarily considered battle royale, first-person shooter (FPS) or multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA). Battle royale, FPS and MOBA are all highly popular genres among web2 online video games, with strong player engagement in games like PUBG and Fortnite, which recorded 19.31 million and 15.53 million daily active players in April 2023.

Most Successful Web3 Game Genre

On the other hand, collectible card games have shown signs of being the most successful genre brought into crypto so far: Top web3 collectible trading card game Splinterlands has 25.7% of the number of Hearthstone players, and 37.2% of Yu-Gi-Oh! players. Both Hearthstone and Yu-Gi-Oh! are classics in the trading card game genre.

This shows the strong synergy between blockchain technology and collectible trading card games, and suggests that this might be the leading genre for driving gamers’ adoption of crypto. 

Most Played Web3 vs Web2 Games (April 2023)

*Number of players playing simultaneously at its peak in a day, on average.

Methodology

The study examined comparisons of the top web3 and web2 or traditional online games, based on their estimated average daily number of players in April 2023. Data for web3 player numbers were from Footprint Analytics, which was analyzed in an earlier study on the Top 20 Web3 Games, while data for web2 player numbers were from ActivePlayer.

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Curious to find out more about our previous research studies? Check out this one we did on what people use crypto for.

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Lim Yu Qian

Yuqian is a crypto research analyst at CoinGecko, covering a range of topics from NFTs to ETFs, crypto adoption and interest, and beyond. She's especially fascinated by the philosophical and socioeconomic aspects of crypto. She holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences with Honors from the National University of Singapore. Follow the author on Twitter @solosbrqt