Crypto gaming is back in the limelight once again, its latest dead-for-good diagnosis stirring up plenty of debate … once again.
On that diagnosis, which some people took as a write-off of Solana gaming projects, I’ll just say the ensuing discourse got a little wild. No, crypto gaming isn’t dead. And yes, the Solana ecosystem does offer support to game builders and is continuing to field new experiments and great third-party innovations like MagicBlock’s tech.
To be sure, though, it’s no secret that in recent years many crypto games, across many chains, have disappeared like salt into the sea. If you consider this trend of failures in isolation, it’s understandable to see “doom” as the writing on the wall.
I don’t blame someone for coming to that opinion. I personally disagree and see “BIGGER THINGS ARE NEARING” bolded on the wall instead, so to speak. There are too many tailwinds coming together in the other direction for me to feel broadly bearish on crypto gaming.
I’m bearish on certain pockets or certain approaches in the scene, sure. But onchain infra, particularly around UX, is lightyears better now than it was in 2021 (after which the vast majority of the “dead” games above launched). The bubbly excesses of that era have been washed out of the market, too, and the advent of AI coding means building games, and building new types of games, is only going to keep getting faster and easier.
You can already see these threads coming together today if you zoom into the right places. A prime example I think of here is the Starknet gaming ecosystem. Starknet itself is performant and natively supports account abstraction, so stuff like session keys, 1-click tx bundles, etc. And then atop Starknet are great bespoke tools like Dojo (an onchain game engine), Cartridge (a gaming smart contract wallet), and Starkzap (an AI-friendly SDK for easily building Starknet apps).
A natural result of these pillars is that Starknet is very flexible for game devs, and here builders can readily build games that abstract away crypto’s clunky elements, such that these titles, big or small, feel like actual recreation to players instead of thinly-veiled onchain casinos.
This reality is why some of the most complex onchain games today, like Realms, build on Starknet. Not only was Realms S1 the most sophisticated onchain gaming I’ve tried so far, but plenty of times during it I forgot I was playing a “crypto game” at all. That’s what Starknet offers now.
When you pull all of this together, and to the extent that Starknet is indicative of possibilities on other chains, there are grounds to be bullish on crypto gaming’s future in general.
Starknet has a strong instantiation of the “easy building + good onchain infra” advantage, yet other chain ecosystems can and will continue to make their own inroads toward easy building + good gaming infra, sometimes directly and sometimes incidentally. In this light, to me Starknet and the kinds of things that are being built on Starknet now are previews of what will come more widely in crypto gaming later.
For instance, the Dojo community just held its Game Jam VIII hackathon, which saw +30 games built over the course of this past weekend using Starknet, Dojo, and etc. If you look across all the submissions, some trends stick out:
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Some of the titles used fully onchain economies + mechanics, like Planets.
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Some of them were remixes of classic games, like Linot and Crossword Clash.
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A third of the entries used commit-reveal proofs and ZK verification for trustless hidden game state, like Cipher, Contagion, Dark Waters, and Pokerstarks.
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A handful of the titles also integrated AI as a first-class mechanic. For example, in 0xCIV players steer their civilization via text commands to Claude, while Rekkaimon Forge makes its pocket monster sprites procedurally via Google Gemini.
These Game Jam VIII experiments were built by small teams over a period of a few days, but they’re already showing us what’s coming in crypto gaming. Rapid iteration, build with any engine (Dojo, CairoVM, Godot, etc.) for any genre. New kinds of onchain gaming economies, new kinds of AI games, new kinds of zero-trust multiplayer titles.
These are all areas that developers have really only just begun to explore. To think there is no future for crypto gaming when there is so much frontier left in front of us is a mistake, in my opinion. I used the Starknet ecosystem above to illustrate my grand point, as I see the chain as the tip of the spear here. The bottom line is that it’s now possible to build better crypto games faster than ever before, and in unprecedented directions.
Personally, I’m optimistic about what that reality bodes for gaming in general. This is the start of a promising new era.