Blockchain needs a killer game to hit the mainstream
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Although blockchain, crypto and NFT are in the news these days, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not exactly mainstream. Many may know of 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 will go mainstream.”
The group is trying to explain just that, while coming up with some ideas on how to bring about wider adoption.
That kind of knowledge doesn’t happen until people have an undeniable reason to dive in. 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 were cemented into the collective consciousness. Games existed before them, but the two arcade games really brought gaming forward in a mainstream way.
Years later, gaming was a known quantity, but it was the territory of nerds. Gamers can play anything and everything, but sports gaming brought consoles into the mainstream. Personally, everyone I knew owned a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis. Not just peers, but parents.
My friends played things like Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Their parents played PGA Tour 96.
“Basically, any time there’s a new platform or a paradigm shift,” Welch said. “The key is to understand which rules are written that are going to remain dominant and remain literal, and which are going to be completely broken.”
Later console generations repeated the pattern. Gaming was more mainstream, but suddenly it wasn’t just for geeks. A whole new type of player seemed to emerge; the people who only played the latest Madden, or Call of Duty and nothing else.
The rise of mobile gaming is similar. Farmville, Candy Crush and Angry Birds took the world by storm. I saw parents go hard on the wildly popular mobile games, to the point of buying new laptops and new phones to play them.
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 explode in a mainstream way. I ping my mom occasionally about things like this, just to see where she is.
Right now she knows of blockchain. When I asked, she specifically warned me against investing in bitcoin. Blockchain games, specifically, are not on her radar. Blockchain, to her, is intrinsically linked to crypto. Crypto is something she distrusts.
Blockchain needs a killer app to go mainstream. But more than that, it needs a killer app to separate itself from being related only to crypto. It needs a game that is completely easy to access, and addictive enough to keep people engaged. It doesn’t specifically have to be a game either. Just… something. Something to draw people into.
Once that is accomplished, the overall goal of using blockchain technology has a chance to take over.
“Games right now are intranets. Blockchain represents a way to connect all games,” Linder said. “NFTs and blockchain really represent the ways to connect all these independent, disparate games and communities into one big gaming ecosystem.”
Without that, it may never reach the mainstream at all.
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