While the market fixates on Bitcoin’s all-time highs and the latest craze of AI memecoins, a sleeping giant lurks in the shadows, poised to make a dramatic entrance onto our Coinmarketcap tabs in 2025.
This giant: None other than GameFi – the fusion of gaming and decentralized finance. It is projected that the gaming market will exceed $200 billion in 2025. GameFi – the natural evolution of gaming as it gives power back to the gamers – is perfectly poised to take advantage of this gigantic number.
In years past, gamers have been sceptical of blockchain – and fair enough, for so long, blockchain games… sucked. They were at best pixellated constructions of fly-wheel economics. Axie Infinity briefly captured people’s imaginations in 2021, breaking this trend, but the bore of Decentraland and a lack of anything else new once again broke their spirits.
Today however, the sector is finally ready to stage an epic comeback. Lessons have been learned since past bull markets. For those who’ve stayed engaged, you already know. As 2025 approaches, GameFi has a munitions stockpile of new releases that will rock the world.
Hundreds of titles are in the works. Amongst these, AAA games that rival traditional gaming in gameplay and graphics. It’s not an exhaustive list, but we have Off The Grid, Illuvium, Star Atlas, Mars4, Mirandus, Engines of Fury and Guild of Guardians. We have innovations coming from old favourites like Axie Infinity and Sandbox. And then, there are the smaller but no less compelling titles that are steadily growing their communities: Pixels, Wolfgame, My Neighbour Alice, Cat.Town and Cryptoblades.
Aside from the countless development hours that have been invested into the sector, GameFi also stands to be benefit from advancements in blockchain technology. Today, we have numerous Layer-2 solutions that enable fast TX speeds and miniscule costs – meaning games can focus on being games, while the blockchain operates discreetly in the background.
In addition to this, cryptocurrency’s increasing adoption reduces the hurdle gamers will feel about setting up wallets and engaging with the tech in the first place. Not a week goes by without a report of a traditional gaming company dipping their toes into blockchain tech. What once felt like a herculean divide between worlds, Traditional Gaming and GameFi are rapidly moving closer to closer as their values and goals become more closely aligned.
Life’s greatest rewards are those that are worked at for a long time with little pay off. This is what encapsulates GameFi right this moment. In the depths of the recent crypto winter, most people left. Investors pulled their money. The crypto sphere became a shell of its former self, constituted of nothing but scammy influencers flipping worthless memecoins. But quietly, in the background, sat the developers working away and crafting a new technological frontier, the upcoming Web3 gaming revolution. It is in thanks to these devs that we stand at this historic juncture. It is in thanks to these devs that we can say: Gaming will finally be the hands of the gamers.
