Early crypto games launched way back in 2017, with CryptoKitties becoming the earliest craze, causing congestion on the Ethereum network. CryptoKitties led to the creation of the ERC-721 NFT standard, and the first game-centric chain Flow.
The First GameFi Wave in 2021, ushered in by Axie Infinity and later StepN brought new GameFi trends such as Play-to-Earn (P2E) and Move-to-Earn (M2E). Blockchain games across a variety of genres quickly followed, and quickly spread beyond Ethereum onto more performant chains with cheaper gas fees.
While most of these games eventually collapsed due to overly-simplistic gameplay and unsustainable tokenomics, a few of them such as Alien Worlds, Farmers World, Splinterlands and Axie Infinity have survived until today, albeit with a much smaller community of active addresses. Compared to the peak of GameFi in November 2021, the number of active participating addresses have declined by 57.9% to 837k.
We’ve summarized the key highlights, but be sure to dig into the full 21 slides below.
Top 4 Highlights of CoinGecko’s GameFi Report 2023
- The top 20 most active blockchain games in 2023 attract an average of 685K daily active addresses, with Alien Worlds leading the rankings.
- Farming / mining gaming genre is the most active, with 253K daily active addresses.
- Skale is the most active chain for gaming by number of active daily GameFi addresses, with over 230K.
- Generalized blockchains have failed to attract GameFi activities, with gaming transactions below 9%.
Introduction: What is Blockchain Gaming and Play-to-Earn?
Blockchain Gaming
As smart contracts and NFTs gained traction on Ethereum, developers started bringing traditional video game features onto the blockchain. This led to the birth of blockchain games, with CryptoKitties being one of the earliest iterations. These games introduced the ERC-721 NFT standard, enabling users to verify in-game actions and trade their virtual items with others in a decentralized manner.
While these games proved to be extremely popular, they exposed the weakness of Ethereum’s scalability. This led game developers to migrate and build on chains that were more performant and cheaper.
Play-to-Earn
In late 2020, the growing interest in Axie NFTs and the Axie Infinity card game sparked the Play-to-Earn (P2E) trend. P2E, as the name suggests, lets users earn income by playing games. Each game has its own economy, strategies, and ways to build a reliable income. A common approach is selling in-game resources that require significant time investment to obtain.
Although the P2E excitement faded quickly due to low-quality games and unsustainable rewards, the GameFi sector has expanded over the past few years. It now goes beyond just monetizing video games, also encompassing other activities like Move-to-Earn.
1. The Top 20 Games Attract 685K Daily Active Addresses
Overall, Alien World, Farmers World and Splinterlands are the most active web3 games in 2023 up to end-November with an average of 197.8K, 101.3K and 75.2K daily active addresses. However, active addresses for these games have seen declines through out the year.
Sweat Economy has had a meteoric rise in 2023 to become the most active Web3 game in November, with 116k average daily active addresses compared to 22k in January.
Of the Top 20 games, only two were launched in 2023. Both Pixels on Ronin (launched in May) and BLCR on Polygon (launched in August) have seen strong growth, climbing to average daily active addresses of 74K and 63K in November respectively, making them the 4th and 5th most active games of the month.
2. Farming is the Most Active Blockchain Game Genre
Farming / Mining games have proven to be the most active gaming genre in web3 in 2023. As of November 30, farming and mining games attracted 253K daily active addresses. This is followed by Card Games with 178K, and Move-to-Earn (M2E) games with 166K.
Meanwhile, the Metaverse genre has faded in popularity, having managed to attract only 44K active addresses. This makes it the seventh most active genre, with SecondLive being the dominant game. It attracts 16K daily active addresses across BSC, Arbitrum, and zkSync Era.
Strategy and Shooter games have the smallest player bases as compared to other genres. The two genres attract 13K and 6K daily active addresses respectively. The lackluster interest can be attributed to the lack of development, with existing titles lacking modern gameplay mechanics.
3. Skale is the Most Active Chain for Web3 Games, With Over 230K Daily Active Addresses
Skale is the most active chain for web3 gaming, with 230K daily active addresses in November 2023. This is helped by the fact that it’s a gasless blockchain, lowering the barrier of entry for players.
While the popularity of Axie Infinity has dwindled since its peak in 2021 to over 17K daily active GameFi addresses, activity on Ronin has resurged due to the migration of Pixels from Polygon, bringing with them an additional 87K active addresses. With the majority of activity concentrated around these two titles, Ronin has become the third most active gaming network.
Under the Others category, the majority of daily active addresses are coming from Sweat Economy which is built on Near, and BLCR which is built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
4. The Share of Active GameFi Addresses on Generalized Blockchains Remains Small
Unsurprisingly, chains built specifically for gaming such as ImmutableX, Wax and Ronin have a much larger share of active GameFi addresses on their network, with 95% of ImmutableX’s addresses participating in GameFi. With zero gas fees, it is also no surprise that GameFi contribute to most of the transactions on ImmutableX (88%) and Wax (91%).
The exception to this seems to be Flow, where only 36% of its active addresses are participating in GameFi, and only 27% of total transactions on the chain are GameFi transactions.
GameFi transactions on gasless blockchains Skale and Hive only make up ~40 - 50% of all transactions, despite a large majority of active addresses on both networks participating in GameFi. Most of the non-GameFi transactions are on social apps, analytics and smart contract creation.
Generalized networks, such as Solana, BNB Smart Chain and Polygon, have a much lower share of active GameFi addresses and GameFi transactions, as these blockchains are more widely used for trading memecoins and DeFi activities.
Read the Report: CoinGecko’s GameFi Report 2023
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CoinGecko's editorial team comprises writers, editors, research analysts and cryptocurrency industry experts. We produce and update our articles regularly to provide the most complete, accurate and helpful information on all things cryptocurrencies. Follow the author on Twitter @coingecko
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