How casual gaming can be a ‘huge’ Bitcoin on-ramp
You can now play Solitaire, Snake and even Counter-Strike to earn Satoshis, tiny fractions of Bitcoin (BTC). Cointelegraph spoke with executives at Thndr Games, a play-to-earn (P2E) company built around Bitcoin, and Zebedee, a gaming platform that will “transform gaming with the power of Bitcoin.”
Thanks to the Lightning Network (LN), a layer-2 payment solution built on top of Bitcoin, instant microtransactions of Sats can be quickly paid out to players worldwide. “This really solves a need in gaming,” Ben Cousens, chief strategy officer at Zebedee, told Cointelegraph.
Zebedee offers Bitcoin and LN support for popular games like Counter-Strike: Go. They promote casual play and the creation of welcoming environments that can “bring people into Bitcoin in a way that surprises them,” Cousens explained.
For THNDR, which released a Solitaire-style mobile game on Monday, the rollout of popular, casual game types is also about getting people into Bitcoin. They are actively targeting players in emerging markets as well as female target groups.
Desiree Dickerson, CEO and co-founder of Thndr Games, shared some statistics with Cointelegraph during a call: “Sixty percent of all women worldwide play games, and 60% of those women play mobile games every day.”
On top of that, the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry: Around “2.6 billion people worldwide play games,” and within that segment, mobile games are the most popular. “It’s 60% of the entire gaming market and it’s only growing,” Dickerson explained.
The release of Club Bitcoin: Solitaire specifically taps into the growing female audience segment:
“The goal is to get people into Bitcoin, but we’re never going to make a game that’s not a good game. We don’t just want to target Bitcoiners non-stop. It’s about making an excellent game that has Bitcoin in it .”
Around 60% of Thndr Games’ users are located in the Global South, a popular hotspot for Bitcoiner companies. Emerging markets suffer from unstable regimes, volatile currencies and weaker socio-economic development.
In this environment, the asset Bitcoin can provide a financial lifeline to many, and thanks to near-instant payment rails and Bitcoin-centric games, the Bitcoin protocol now offers a means of escapism as well as small financial rewards. At Zebedee, for example, the average transaction size is small, just $0.02.
Cousens told Cointelegraph, “Gaming and Bitcoin and lighting is a huge push for Bitcoin [adoption],” shares that Brazil is a key territory for their user base, followed by the Philippines – both countries with an emerging crypto adoption boom.
Furthermore, both Dickerson and Cousens illustrated that games are a way to get people into Bitcoin without “ideology”. The Bitcoin and crypto spaces are full of conflict, thrashing and told-you-so, while gaming – especially idle gaming – is a laid-back environment where users can start stacking Bets.
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Thndr has sent over 1.5 million rewards across LN and gained a growing audience of devoted fans. All the games on the Apple App Store have ratings of 4.5 stars or more. “We think almost first and foremost about the pure enjoyment of the game,” Dickerson explained.
For Cousens, who is well aware of the risk of “hyper-funding” of gaming products, he explains that it is difficult to underestimate the role that random games can play in Bitcoin adoption. “A bad casual mobile game has about 10 million downloads […] You get a game or two, you dwarf El Salvador.”
El Salvador was able to bring a total population of 6.4 million people to earn, save and use Bitcoin, thanks to the Bitcoin Law. Solitaire, by comparison, has 35 million monthly users, according to Microsoft. And that’s just one game.
