The Opportunity for Web3 Mobile Games

Mobile Games for Mass Adoption

Mobile Games represent a huge opportunity for web3 growth. The mobile games market is massive. 7 billion people own mobile devices, compared to 2 billion with personal computers. Mobile apps generate $350 billion revenue each year, of which 85% comes from mobile games. Moreover, mobile games dominate PCs, with the industry size estimated to be over 2x as large.

In contrast, web3 mobile games are currently very small. Web3 mobile games’ market cap is $1 billion, compared to PC’s $15 billion. When compared to traditional gaming, this implies that web3 mobile games have room to grow by 34x to reach the same mobile-to-PC ratio.

Games in particular are well-suited to tokenization. Games are filled with valuable in-game assets which are natural to tokenize and financialize. Additionally, games are interactive, filling out the entire read-write-own paradigm of web3. Games are social with highly engaged and invested in the success of the games themselves, lending naturally to DAO community structures. In fact, many game communities are heavily involved in improving the game ecosystem themselves, by developing third-party apps, fostering the community, and sometimes even taking over development. Games are filled with emergent complexity which arises and can be enhanced with interoperability.

The demographics of gamers are also well-suited for web3. Many gamers are young male technology enthusiasts, evoking a similar image to “cryptobro” or “web3 degen” that you are likely to see at blockchain meetups. Mobile games and crypto are disproportionately popular in developing countries with emerging middle classes, where wealth is growing to the point where populations can invest in both entertainment and financial planning. The lack of home desktop internet infrastructure is correlated with a lack of trust in centralized government-run financial institutions. Top countries for both mobile game growth and crypto adoption include India, Vietnam, Turkey, Nigeria and Argentina. The global coverage and overlap is tremendous.