3 Silly Anti-Web3 Gaming Arguments

Reflect it back at web2 gaming, and these diatribes fall apart

When you contextualize a couple well-trodden anti-blockchain games arguments, blockchain gaming doesn't look a whole lot different than games as we know them.

"No one wants NFTs"

This argument is misguided for several reasons:

1) No one wants the hassle of on-ramping, yes. New best practices like Stripe's direct purchase will make it so people buy NFTs like any other IAP, so the hassle argument disappears. Web3 will merely be the tech rails of an item that behaves like any other. 

2) Speaking of IAPs, no one wanted those, either. And here we are. 1%-10% of players "want" IAPs enough to buy them each month. Which still drives most of the $200B industry. So upwards of 99% of gamers don't "want" the current standard we're all now totally cool with.

Not every gamer will use on-chain benefits. Just as most CS:GO players don't "want" to trade web2 skins, and most WoW players don't sell their cards. In web3, most gamers will continue to play exactly as they're used to and never think about trades or transferability. And that's perfectly fine.

The point being: we, as gamers, already do this. Some of us already go extra lengths to progress, to expand a game's universe, or make money. One day the backend of that for some games will be driven by the blockchain, and no one will bat an eye. The complaint that "no one wants this" is fallacious, but the challenge is for devs to show us why it can be cool.

"Web3 games are unsustainable" 

Yeah, most games are unsustainable, full stop. Last year, 10,963 games launched on Steam alone. There are over 280,000 games on iOS. Have you heard about more than 35 of these? No.

Some argue they fail because of lack of users, rather than incorrect economics. The answer is both: plenty of games get users and then don't know how to properly monetize them to get money to acquire more users. Bad cycle.

Nearly all web3 games, just like every other generation of gaming, will fail because of the same issues. People forget how top heavy gaming is. For any platform, 10-50 games account for 80% of the market. The rest? Unsustainable.

The argument that looks at the current web3 game experiments and/or failures to predict the demise of the technology in gaming overall doesn't stand up against the realities of the games industry to date.

"Most of web3 is a scam"

The blockchain popularized alternative fundraising. The notion that "most" of it was scams is incorrect. Foolish? Yes. Unlikely to succeed? Yes.

People have not said the same for Kickstarter games, most of which were also silly investments. People invested in tokens whose value crashed and whose teams can't deliver. That's a failure of retail investing and due diligence, not a scam. Robinhood—as technology that makes it easy for the average consumer to make dumb in some public game companies—is not a scam.

By GMV, most NFT collections are not scams. They're legitimate companies. Will they succeed as game developers? Probably not, same as most web2 devs.