Gaming Is Growing, And Web3 Is Coming With It
Video games have come a long way since the restrictive days of Pong in 1972. The limitless sandbox games of Fortnite and Minecraft now dominate the market, with the latter having sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. Gaming has had a meteoric rise since the ’70s, and the industry is still growing. The gaming industry is expected to be worth $312 billion by 2027.
A lot of the recent growth the industry has seen has been a result of the pandemic forcing people inside who booted up their consoles in search of an escape.Now that the pandemic has died down, I believe further growth will come from strategic moves by gaming companies attacking two of the biggest driving factors for growth in the market.
Meanwhile, I’ve observed that Web3 gaming seems to be positioning itself to ride the larger waves that the gaming industry is creating, with hopes of one day breaking through to the mainstream. This is something I’m seeing through my public relations company’s work with technology clients. I’ve been in Web3 since 2020, and we have worked with dozens of games in the industry in the past year alone.
Through this experience, I’ve noticed that there are two sides to the industry: casual and hardcore gamers. As a way to appease both audiences, companies appear to be making strategic moves to nurture the mobile gaming market (for the casual gamer) as well as strengthen or create esports scenes (for the hardcore gamer).
Mobile Gaming
Despite PlayStation and Xbox seeming to dominate the gaming landscape, it is, in fact, mobile gaming that makes up for most video game revenue. This dominance isn’t expected to end anytime soon, with predictions for mobile gaming to grow 13.55% annually until 2030.
Mobile classics like Subway Surfers and Candy Crush still dominate the app stores, but Marvel Snap recently took mobile gamers by storm—even winning Mobile Game of the Year at the DICE Awards. From my perspective, Marvel Snap’s success shows the appetite gamers have for mobile trading card battlers, a trend that Web3 is attempting to take full advantage of. For example, trading card battler Axie Infinity, a popular Web3 title, released a mobile app. This comes amid other mobile Web3 trading card battlers, such as Splinterlands, that I believe are poised to capitalize on this trend within mobile gaming.
Forbes
