The post Is Web3 Outperforming Traditional Gaming or Still Falling Short? appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News
In traditional gaming, players invest significant resources in acquiring items, building characters, and unlocking achievements. However, the assets remain locked within the ecosystem and are inaccessible for transfer or resale.
Powered by blockchain technology, Web3 gaming introduces true asset ownership via fungible and non-fungible tokens. Players can sell or trade their in-game items across platforms, building a player-driven economy that mirrors real-world markets.
Blockchains introduce transparency and reduce restrictions
Blockchains introduce transparency, verifying and reliably storing each in-game transaction, which helps prevent fraud and builds trust between developers and players. Web3 games are hosted on a decentralized node network, making them very hard to hack or shut down. The network also allows users to play Web3 games from anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection.
Tradition meets modernity in the mobile-friendly Web3 game NFL Rivals, officially licensed by the National Football League and the NFL Players Association. It brings together NFT trading and fantasy football, allowing players to create and manage a virtual team, trade individual game characters as NFTs, compete against other teams, etc. The unique NFTs come with different strengths and rarity levels and can be sold, bought, and traded on Mythical Marketplace, the trading platform of the game’s creator, Mythical Games. More than 150,000 people signed up to play NFL Rivals in its beta phase, and this number increased further after the official launch.
The game was downloaded more than five million times in the inaugural season when more than 115 million games were played. NFT trading volume reached $6 million in 2024. In-game NFT trades took just over a month to increase from $4 million to $5 million and 27 days to grow from $5 million to $6 million. The platform will launch FIFA Rivals, targeting soccer fans across the globe, in the summer of 2025.
Web2 continues to dominate global gaming
While Web3’s rapid progress has been remarkable, Web2 games remain more accessible to a wider audience. In February 2025, Roblox alone reported 85 million daily active users, with its monthly player base including 50% of US children under 16. Other major titles, such as Call of Duty, Minecraft, and Fortnite, each boast tens of millions of active players.
In addition, user engagement with Web3 games tends to fluctuate. The industry reached 5.5 million daily active users in November 2024, up 15.7% from October. However, this growth is not consistent across platforms. Hamster Kombat claimed over 300 million users in August and September 2024, but actual engagement was far lower, with 51.9 million monthly active users at the end of October. Web3 gaming may be growing, but it still represents a small fraction of the global gaming market.
What’s more, concepts like Web3, NFTs, and blockchain have failed to resonate with many Web2 users. This prompted the developers or publishers of Steam, GTA V, and Minecraft to remove everything related to Web3 from their platforms.
Real interest in company growth makes all the difference
Web2 platforms sell user data to advertisers to make money, contrasting with the sacrosanctity of personal information in Web3. How do the games make a profit, then? The difference lies in the interest of organizations like the DAO supporting Mythical Games in company development and growth. If the platform grows, the value of the native token (in this case, MYTH) required to participate in the ecosystem increases, and players can sell it. What’s more, MYTH token holders play a crucial role by voting on DAO proposals, taking part in governance decisions, and generally influencing the Mythical ecosystem’s direction.
While Web2 players spend money on digital items without external value, Web3 currencies and goods can appreciate over time, giving players a reliable incentive to engage. These processes are palpable in emerging markets, where blockchain-based games can offer a feasible alternative to conventional forms of employment. Players can enjoy the games while capitalizing on project growth. Web3 is still in its infancy, but the lucrative mechanisms underpinning it promise to enhance and sustain players’ motivation to a greater extent than its predecessor.
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