The reality is that the dreams of web3 investors and founders are facing a bit of a jam a crypto downturn generally means less hype, fewer conversations between friends and generally less organic consumer onboarding to consumer experiences.
VCs game , This is far from ideal for VCs who saw a consumer web dream within grasp, but fortunately they’ve got some deep pockets thanks to recently raised mega funds with crypto bets as their sole focus. Still, it’s a rough time for consumer crypto’s core audience though, with recently minted acolytes down bad and many likely discouraged from sinking more time, money or effort into new web3 projects. The question becomes how to put this VC money to work in a bear cycle; plenty will take the period of reduced attention to dump into infrastructure and the “picks and shovels” toolsets. Others might go insular, backing consumer projects that are further disconnected from the broader worlds of crypto but expose users to synthetic economies, wallets and digital goods, an arena served particularly well by crypto-infused games.
Gaming does seem like a great consumer beachhead for crypto and I’d expect plenty of these dedicated crypto funds to dump a significant quantity of their funds into studios and platforms pursuing this. There are a lot of substantial challenges, including generally negative user sentiment and getting platform buy-in — given that NFTs are still treated with a high-degree of hostility by app stores and gaming platforms.
The self-contained worlds of gaming titles with dedicated tokens disconnected from the more self-referential corners of crypto may be the easiest place to find new eyeballs. And as customer acquisition costs across the board climb, VCs may be more willing to subsidize customers directly as part of user acquisition, returning to the gig economy days of VCs game bribing new users to sign-up. It’s been a weird bull cycle for crypto gaming. While plenty of money flowed into play-to-earn titles and pixelated SNES-quality DeFi-infused games, it’s fair to say that there wasn’t anything that emerged that was actually good. Most games over-indexed on profit and clearcut ponzinomics that juiced growth to the most extreme ends without a concern for stability. Great games take time to build, and fun games take a level of user concern that’s hard to optimize for when you’re trying to maximize near-term profit on both ends of the deal.
Source: This news is originally published by techcrunch