Opinion: Let's revisit the big claims about blockchain games from 2022
2022 is almost over! It feels like only yesterday that we were drowning in the fervor of the blockchain industry. Remember the giant booths at Game Developers Conference? All the talk of players selling off their digital items when they're done with a game? " Axie Infinity's supposed deliverance of the "play to earn" model? Good times, good times.
In a year where I was much happier writing about Marvel Snap, Beacon Pines, and the unionization wins at Activision Blizzard, I found myself cursed with being Game Developer's semi-regular blockchain columnist. It was I who wandered into the panel at DICE, who quizzed developers and execs about it at GDC, and whose inbox was drowning in pitches from breathless PR reps from the world of web3.
How's web3 going by the way? Great? Oh, not great. Boy that's a lot of lawsuits and lost cash.
If I were the charitable sort, I'd pen something like this closer to next GDC, having given the blockchain developer crowd a full year to make good on their promises. I'll be fair here—even a year is not enough time to make a good game. There are quite possibly developers making some neat blockchain-adjacent projects still operating in stealth mode.
But this technology is controversial for a reason, and its proponents have pushed back on criticism by constantly touting the "potential" of true ownership, play-to-earn, renting digital land, etc. etc. And if you took some like Andreessen Horowitz general partner Jonathan Lai at their word, critics were "misinformed" by polarization on Reddit and Twitter.
Well Twitter is now owned by a billionaire who tweets out "my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci" and I've personally tuned my Reddit feed mostly toward how great Star Wars: Andor is—and the crypto world is
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