Make no mistake, high-quality and engaging blockchain games are coming, and they will serve as a gateway for millions of new people to enter the space. How can gaming bring so many people into crypto? Very simply, by making it so frictionless that gamers don’t even realize they’ve been onboarded. Millions will become immersed just as they do with traditional games today and not even realize they have set up a crypto wallet and amassed various tokens and NFTs in the process (among other things).

Although not gaming per se, check out the Reddit NFT phenomenon last year if you do not believe me. In July 2022, Reddit launched a marketplace for its users to purchase avatars to use on the platform as NFT profile pictures.

As part of this launch, Reddit intentionally avoided the stigma associated with NFTs by calling their avatars “collectibles,” and also made it relatively seamless for its users to get set up and make purchases. Only a credit card was needed, and anything having to do with crypto wallets, secure passphrases, or blockchain-related infrastructure was hidden away in the background to avoid distraction and make the process as simple as possible. The end result — nearly three million crypto wallets created, which at the time was more than the number of active wallets on OpenSea. If anything, Reddit’s success shows that if done right, gaming can similarly serve as a true Trojan horse for global blockchain adoption.

Blockchain Gaming Poised for Breakout

2023 is setting up to be the year blockchain gaming starts to go mainstream. Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable, summed up the state of Web3 gaming nicely in a recent tweet at the start of this year.

“$18B has been poured into web3 gaming in the last 2 years, but development lags behind funding significantly.

Many will go live in 2023 as they hit 2–3 years in development.

One moderately successful hit by Web2 standards (~50m players) will *triple* web3’s userbase overnight.

It’s extremely likely the next wave of public adoption and narrative hysteria will be catalysed by a viral web3 game.

This will be the first time any web3 project will have meaningfully gone mainstream.

It will almost certainly happen in the next 12–18 months.”

I could not agree more. There are numerous quality blockchain games out there soon coming to market after years of development. The Web3 gaming industry itself is not even two years old, and to expect anything of decent caliber on a faster timeline would be underestimating the time and cost it takes to build games that do not look like arcade games out of the ’80s, let alone incorporate a nascent technology still in development. For more color on the Web3 gaming development lag, I recommend checking out this piece (AB’s Substack) which brings up some potential reasons for delay.

Star Atlas, Illuvium, Treeverse and many more blockchain games that finally emphasize quality gameplay and storytelling over “earn first” models are nearing some form of playable version, with some even approaching public beta in 2023. Many of us have been looking forward to these games for quite some time (including me) and cannot wait to jump in.

Do not underestimate the impact of gaming — this is big business, with more than three billion gamers globally and a market raking in nearly $200 billion annually. And guess what, both gaming engagement and crypto usage/buyers are predominantly driven by younger generations. These worlds are colliding, and if you think blockchain gaming will remain the small fraction of the broader gaming market that it is today (less than 3% as of writing), I beg to differ.

Infrastructure Hurdles

However, it is not as simple as getting the funding, spending a few years in development, and spitting out a quality Web3 game. Creativity and gameplay aside (which is a HUGE factor), a big hurdle when it comes to developing Web3 games is how to effectively incorporate the necessary blockchain infrastructure.

For example, think of popular MMORPGs like World of Warcraft which have thousands or even millions of daily active players. If this were a blockchain-based MMORPG, at any given moment there might be thousands of transactions occurring on a marketplace among players trading NFTs. Due to network congestion, imagine having to wait 30 seconds for every transaction to go through, or having to pay $10 in gas fees just to purchase an item. The game would be untenable and players would never stick around, even if the game were based on a great idea. For those who experienced the NFT craze in 2021/2022, you know what I’m talking about.

Or think about how most of us currently connect to MetaMask every time we want to interact with a Web3 application. This requires signing into an account every time you want to make a transaction and maintaining responsibility over security (e.g., keeping seed phrase safe, password secure, not connecting to malicious sites, etc.).

Realistically, why would millions of non-crypto native gamers, old and young alike, ever bother with this hassle when they can just play other fun traditional games without it? The answer — they won’t. Blockchain technology unlocks new opportunities for gamers by redefining digital property ownership and value sharing within games, but these are secondary components within the overall gaming experience. Web3 games need to be fun first to bring in players at scale, and these issues take a lot of the fun out of the games.

Building Frictionless Blockchain Gaming Experiences

The above are just some examples of what Web3 gaming developers have to overcome in order to entice traditional gamers over en masse.

What is exciting is that with any hurdle often comes opportunity and innovation. What we are just now starting to see is a variety of Web3 gaming platforms emerge that specialize in providing the tools and infrastructure for traditional gaming developers to seamlessly integrate their products into Web3 technology.

To give an example, in this section I’ll highlight one platform in particular that is starting to gain significant traction, called MetaFab. MetaFab was created by the ArkDev himself, which was born out of necessity when creating NFT Worlds. What Unreal Engine is to Fortnite, essentially MetaFab is to NFT Worlds and any other game or developer that chooses to use the tools it provides. Better yet, the tech is free to use.

Examples of MetaFab Capabilities

About a week ago, ArkDev wrote a thread explaining how MetaFab’s technology is set to open the floodgates for Web3 gaming adoption by enabling “frictionless” experiences for gamers. As he explains, much of MetaFab’s tooling directly addresses the pain points experienced by Web3 users today. Some highlights of what developers are capable of building on MetaFab are below.

Gasless Transactions. Player interaction in games (including trades, etc.) all without needing tokens for gas or signing transactions. For example, say a player wants to open a crate or do any other action on-chain in a game. Typically, this action would require a MetaMask pop up, transaction confirmation, gas, long finality, etc. With MetaFab, the experience is “open crate” — done.

Crypto/NFT Wallets. For the masses without previous crypto experience, developers can create games with managed wallets for players. This ‘built-in’ experience makes it seamless for beginners to get onboarded. Create a username and password, join the game, and a wallet is there without even realizing it.

For those who want to use their MetaMask or other externally-controlled wallet instead, they only need connect to their player accounts once with a signature. From that point on, the frictionless experience ensues again without pop ups, gas, long finality, etc.

In terms of removing friction from the player experience, the above core features alone contribute greatly. However, MetaFab is trying to go even further in what it is able to accomplish for developers.

Gaming Ecosystems. Consider decentralized gaming ecosystems like Treasure (some of you may be familiar with its $MAGIC token), which have tens or even hundreds of different games built under a single umbrella. If you’re a player, playing within an ecosystem like this becomes a hassle if you have to constantly connect a wallet to each new game you start playing, or if you have to keep track or otherwise manage which wallets you are using for each game.

MetaFab solves this pain point through ecosystem profiles. With this tooling, as a developer of a gaming ecosystem you can make it easy for players to engage across games in a seamless manner, while also frictionlessly allowing for the secure interoperability of assets. Players can create one-time ecosystem profiles, by default have a managed wallet assigned, and immediately link to any game within that ecosystem in a frictionless manner, with full interoperability in terms of any assets earned or spent.

All of this just works out of the box as a developer when building with MetaFab, making the experience for traditional gaming developers who are not as familiar with the Web3 tech stack much easier. If you look on MetaFab’s homepage, there are also numerous other things that the platform solves for like launching on-chain currencies, items, loot boxes, trading, shops, crafting and more, turning what may have been seen as foreign and complex into minutes of implementation.

Adoption to Date

Given that MetaFab is free to use and battle-tested through the active development of NFT Worlds, it appears to be a bit ahead of its competitors from a gaming perspective. There are a lot of proven and quality Web3 developer products, tools and APIs out there such as Alchemy, but when it comes to the minute details of gaming in particular, very few of these (if any) seem to compete or exist at the moment. We’ll see if that changes in the future, but for the time being, it is therefore no surprise that MetaFab has announced major partnerships with Fantom, Treasure and Arbitrum. RTFKT’s CTO Samuel Cardillo has even joined as an advisor.

“My beliefs in @iamarkdev and his team are growing every single day & I am excited to be able to add my touch to this amazing journey! MetaFab potential is insanely high, in addition to being pure innovation!” — Samuel Cardillo upon being announced as an advisor to MetaFab

Final Thoughts

If not obvious by this article, I’m not only excited for the first quality Web3 games to come to market and go mainstream, but also for the advances in infrastructure that are being built out of necessity alongside this development.

If history is any indicator, I would not be surprised if many of the highly anticipated Web3 games still take longer than anticipated to come out, but their launch is at least on the horizon and gaming toolkits like MetaFab are making development that much easier.