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For all that blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs being in the news these days, it’s pretty obvious it’s not really mainstream. Many people may know from blockchain, but not many people can explain what it is. Stardust’s Canaan Linder, Making Fun’s John Welch and Playful’s Paul Bettner join Digital’s Amy Luo on our GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 panel, “How Blockchain Games Are Going to Go Mainstream.”
The group tries to explain just that, while coming up with some ideas to spark wider adoption.
That kind of knowledge only arises when people have an undeniable reason to dive into it. When you look at gaming as a whole, there are definitely hints of a pattern. In the early days of gaming, Space Invaders and Pac-Man took hold in the collective consciousness. Games already existed before them, but those two arcade games really brought gaming to the forefront in a mainstream way.
Years later, gaming was a well-known amount, but it was the territory of the nerds. Gamers can play anything and everything, but sports games brought consoles into the mainstream. Personally, everyone I knew had a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis. Not only peers, but parents as well.
My friends played things like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Their parents played PGA Tour 96.
“Basically, every time there’s a new platform or paradigm shift,” Welch said. “The key is to understand which rules that are written will remain dominant and remain literal, and which ones will be completely broken.”
Later console generations repeated the pattern. Gaming was more mainstream, but suddenly it wasn’t just for geeks anymore. A whole new type of gamer seemed to be emerging; the people who only played the latest Madden of Call of Duty and nothing else.
The rise of mobile gaming is similar. Farmville, Candy Crush and Angry Birds have taken the world by storm. I saw parents working hard on those incredibly popular mobile games, to the point of buying new laptops and new phones to play them.
The blockchain gaming killer app
Every example I can think of has a great game. A killer app. Blockchain games need something like that, I think, to really blow up in a mainstream way. I occasionally ping my mom about these things, just to see where she is.
At this point she knows from blockchain. When I asked about it, she specifically warned me not to invest in bitcoin. Blockchain gaming in particular is not on her radar. Blockchain is intrinsically linked to crypto. Crypto is something she distrusts.
Blockchain needs a great app to go mainstream. But more than that, it needs a great app to separate itself from just being crypto related. It needs a game that is very easy to access and addictive enough to keep people playing. It doesn’t have to be a game specifically either. Just something. Something to draw people in.
Once that is achieved, the overarching goal of using blockchain technology has a chance to take over.
“Games are now intranets. Blockchain is a way to connect all games together,” Linder says. “NFTs and blockchain really represent the ways to connect all these independent, disparate games and communities into one large gaming ecosystem.”
Without it, it might never reach the mainstream.
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