Gaming is easily the biggest industry in modern entertainment today. In fact, you could combine the revenue of the movie industry and the music industry, double it, and you’d still be shy of the gaming industry! According to Statista.com, global revenue in the video games market is projected to reach US$334.00bn in 2023. Compare this with an estimated $37Bn for the Music industry and $77Bn for the movie industry, and it still doesn’t start to get close as far as comparison goes.
Gaming, like manga and anime, is first, a culture, before an industry. To capture the industry is to understand the culture. If everyone only focused on technology, eSports and live streaming would not be here today.
Innovations driven by a deep understanding of culture and underlying philosophy will always trump sole focus on technology. Technology is best regarded as a medium to facilitate change. Technology only finds adoption because it finds a way to meet culture with improvements.
A fine example is AI. Regardless of how long AI research and breakthrough has been around for, it is currently enjoying an unprecedented wave of attention and successful adoption because it has been steered towards improving aspects of human culture that had fewer options for quality automations —productivity, creativity, convenience etc.
Crypto is just another industry that has been built on and driven by culture. Replete with communities, memes, charts, numbers and most importantly, esoteric lingo (wagmi 🤘🏽). Asides being on the bleeding edge of cutting-edge tech, crypto’s case for success is largely because of the human layer that characterize it. The adoption has swung from organic to artificial: from people motivated by the mouth-watering incentives, to the tinkerers, to the visionaries, to the makers etc, all bound by one tie —adventure.
Despite crypto’s success with culture and communities, it has had a difficult time conquering the gaming industry. We can surmise that this is because of it’s reductive approach —to simply build games and offer incentives. Whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
As we have established that gaming is a culture-based industry, only different from crypto on the basis of its culture ingredients —adventure and reward. Crypto tries to embrace gaming with its own value proposition of adventure and reward, only flavored differently. Bringing us back to where we started: cultural nuances in both industries.
The future of crypto adoption in gaming is not to hope to lure gamers with crypto-type incentives (which can be rather gimmicky), but instead, understanding and adopting the culture of the gaming industry in order to provide truly honest products that embraces gaming as a culture.
The net negative of constantly wrapping crypto trojan horses (crypto-based games) laced with incentives for gamers is that, rather than attract net new gamers; crypto degens, driven by the scent of incentives, will seek ways to game said incentives before the intended targets are reached. Add to the fact that such trojan horses only go to breed further resentments from gamers.
As hard as it is to imagine, the definition of rewards in gaming and crypto couldn’t be more worlds apart! Reward for a gamer is often philosophic and intangible. From fun, to entertainment, to sheer enjoyment. A sense of achievement and self-accomplishment. Grinding hard to accomplish desired result is rewarding. Adventure for gamers is transcendent.
The opposite is true in crypto culture. By design, crypto is built around economies and incentives. Game theory at its finest. Optimized for maximum positive outcome with the least input. Numbers and profits are notable incentives in crypto culture. Reward is money. Adventure is literal. The risks are palpable. Money is often involved.
We can build on our overlapping attributes of adventure and reward. The solution is culture-based innovation. By carefully designing products that balance the incentives of both cultures without sacrificing one in favor of the other. It is possible, but it is not simple.
The entry of crypto companies into gaming currently involves heavy emphasis on the technology rather than culture. Whereas the only valid order of integration should be culture first, technology last.
