Blockchain gaming market is a ‘game of musical chairs’ — Gunzilla exec

The blockchain gaming industry has turned into a "game of musical chairs," with no fresh capital flowing in — just the same money cycling through different gaming projects, according to a blockchain gaming executive.“There is no new money coming into the system,” Gunzilla Games Web3 director Theodore Agranat told Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025 in Hong Kong.Existing capital is being shuffled aroundAgranat said “existing capital” is just being recycled between gaming projects, with no new value entering the system. “I would say it's also a little bit of a game of musical chairs,” he said. Blockchain gaming saw $16 million in funding in January, almost 92% down from December 2024’s $222 million, as per analytics platform DappRadar.Agranat pointed out that unique active wallets (UAW) in blockchain gaming have fallen from “around 10 million last summer” to 7.5 million today, with roughly 70% of Q1 2024 growth driven from airdrop and farming campaigns.DappRadar named Q1 2024 the “play-to-airdrop” era, highlighting blockchain games like RPG game Kuroro Beasts, fighter game AI Arena, and card strategy racing game MixMob as notable games with significant airdrops over the quarter.Agranat said that users were artificially creating multiple crypto wallets and engaging with games solely to collect airdrops, a method he said is “totally unsustainable.”No loyalty in blockchain gaming“They will just go from project to project and extract whatever value they can from that project. And once there's no more value to be had there, they are going to move on to another project,” he said.“These are not long term like clients or users of your project or your product,” he said.“They are professionals and professional folks that, in many instances, are just speculators that want to make a return on the investment,” he said.Agranat said the blockchain gaming sector needs to make the gameplay experience the main focus to move forward — a sentiment that has been echoed across the industry for some time.In July 2024, Kori Leon, co-founder of the TON-based gaming ecosystem Pixelverse, said that some blockchain games failed to deliver on their promises. He said that despite getting a lot of backers and funding, some Web3 gaming projects could not attract players.