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Web3 gaming execs bet big on user numbers and adoption for 2025
With 2025 kicking off, everyone in the Web3 gaming industry — from execs to devs — is sharing their predictions for the year. The consensus? They’ve stopped rambling on about how Web3 games are “gonna be more fun” in the future, and they’re betting on a massive spike in actual user numbers, with traditional gaming publishers and platforms jumping on the bandwagon.
Ava Labs gaming lead “Park,” said in a Dec. 29 X post that Web3 gaming will hit 50 million monthly active users (MAU) this year, and “a top” western gaming publisher will move into Web3 gaming, or a Web3 game will “get acquired by a major publisher.”
Yield Guild Games Corporate Development and Finance Manager Serge-Raymond Nzabandora also believes big user numbers are incoming. He tells Web3 Gamer that several games will hit 1 million Daily Active Users (DAU), and a “select few” will break 5 to 10 million DAUs.
Raymond believes that the third-person battle royale game Off The Grid — which is based on the Avalanche blockchain — will break through 1 million DAUs after its full launch and the release of the GUNZ token.
Raymond says Off The Grid performed “extremely well” during its early access launch on consoles in October.
He believes this is a reasonable assumption since the laid-back adventure game Pixels — one of the hottest Web3 games of 2024 — surpassed 1 million DAUs last year.
Traditional gaming firms set to explore Web3 gaming
“Many games funded last cycle are entering more mature stages of their game development roadmap,” Raymond adds.
Raymond also believes that Web3 gaming will continue to find new distribution platforms, more major studios will enter Web3 gaming and the center of gravity will shift from Asia to the United States.
Immutable’s head of growth and revenue strategy, Tim Moore, said in a Dec. 27 X video that he believes Web3 gaming will cease to be a separate category and “will just become gaming” in 2025.
Meanwhile, Coliseum co-founder and CEO Thomas Zaepffel says he thinks that 2025 is the year that mobile games will “take off and begin to dominate the industry.”
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“Just like most memecoin traders are using mobile wallet apps,” Zaepffel says.
And why not throw in a prediction from an AI agent, too? AIXBT, the popular AI chatbot, thinks utility will take over the Web3 gaming scene in 2025.
Web3 games that are pure tokenomics will die. Only real games with actual governance and player-owned assets survive.”
Gamers can now guess how the year will go with the ‘Forkast’ prediction platform
If you can nail a few of your own crypto gaming predictions it could pay off big time thanks to a new prediction market platform launching this week just for gamers.
On Jan. 7, Community Gaming is launching the first-ever prediction market for gamers, “Forkast,” on the Ronin Network.
(X/Community Gaming)
Users can earn rewards as a cryptocurrency token, CGX, by correctly guessing what will happen in the gaming industry.
“Picture a market for the question, “Will Pixels reach 2M DAU by Christmas?” Ronin said in a Dec. 24 statement, adding that users could vote Yes or No, and if they hit the mark by the deadline the users who voted correctly would “receive onchain rewards from their counterparty.”
Forkast — which has no affiliation with the crypto news publication — has confirmed in a Dec. 29 X post that CGX will have a 1 billion token supply in total.
Of those tokens, 57% will be set aside to go to the community through staking rewards, tournament prizes, airdrops and prediction market incentives, with 12% going to the community on launch day.
Gamers in the know might think this is an easy way to rake in profits, but experience on other platforms suggests it’s not exactly that simple.
Polymarket, a decentralized prediction market platform that allows crypto users to place bets on world events, has worked out favorably for just 12.7% of user wallets.
In October, data from the onchain analytics tool Layerhub shows that 149,383, or 87.3% of the 171,113 crypto wallets on Polymarket, did not make a profit.
Yellow Panther launches ‘Agent YP,’ says AI agent total MC will break $100B
Yellow Panther, one of the biggest Web3 gamers on the planet, is going all in on his new artificial intelligence gaming agent, betting it’ll come out on top.
“There are only a few gaming AI agents now, but I would have to bet on myself and say Agent YP,” Yellow Panther tells Web3 Gamer.
Currently, Agent YP serves as an information and alpha agent on social media platform X, boasting over 6,000 followers. It’s powered by the AI ecosystem Virtuals Protocol and the onchain AI accelerator Agent Starter.
(X/AgentYP)
The 26-year-old is among the first big names in Web3 gaming to launch an AI agent and says the Yellow Panther style cosmetics — items that allow players to customize their character’s appearances — and skins are already in “over 20 Web3 games.”
“Agent YP aims to be a gaming AI agent that provides the fastest and accurate alpha on crypto gaming,” he adds.
Agent YP will be able to interact with other gamers
Yellow Panther has big plans for the agent which he says will soon be able to play onchain games, serve as a non-playable character to interact with other players, and even livestream. He thinks there is a “high chance” that the AI agent will end up competing against Web3 gaming creators directly.
Overall, Yellow Panther thinks at least one of the AI agent ecosystems will break into the top 20 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap and that the total market cap for AI agents will surpass $100 billion.
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The largest AI agent ecosystem by market cap is Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), which has a market cap of $4 billion at the time of publication, as per CoinMarketCap.
Yellow Panther is also excited about the upcoming games that are integrating AI. In particular, he is looking forward to the social simulation game Today The Game, the survival simulation game Parallel Colony and the fighting game AI Arena.
Other News
— Web3 gaming ecosystem Planet Mojo has introduced its first AI agent, “Emma,” designed to assist players with gaming strategies in the ultimate chess battler Mojo Melee.
— The action RPG Fableborne has revealed stats for season 3, boasting 803 years of playtime, over $500,000 in revenue, and more than 3.5 million raids.
— Ubisoft, the French video game company known for Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and the Tom Clancy series, has launched Captain Laserhawk The G.A.M.E. on Arbitrum, the Ethereum layer-2.
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Ciaran Lyons
Ciaran Lyons is an Australian crypto journalist. He’s also a standup comedian and has been a radio and TV presenter on Triple J, SBS and The Project.
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