Web3 Gaming Trends: What To Expect in 2023

2022 was a major year for Web3 gaming, and 2023 is all set to take this growth to new levels. Gamers are starting to expect increasing rewards and a more immersive experience for their time and attention. Blockchain technology provides a more powerful engine with sophisticated, fractionalized rewards for gamers, and it’s just getting started.

The figures back it up. Blockchain games grew by 2,000% between Q1 of 2021 and Q1 of 2022. It's become more than just a hobby — after all, residents of the Philippines gained so much that the government declared all of these Web3 games to be subject to income tax. Web3 gaming has major implications for how people earn, learn, interact, and relax.

The following are some trends to expect in 2023, based on previous patterns and statistical estimates:

Increased & Flexible Asset Ownership

Web3 allows users to have increased control over their assets. Security layers are being enhanced through multifactor authentication, strong seed phrases, and advanced authentication protocols. Moreover, we might not be as far from biometric authentication as is currently believed. Ultimately, Web3 allows for more secure asset ownership where users exercise complete control.

Yet it provides more than this. Marketplaces will be developed that allow traceability between various assets purchased or earned on a multiplicity of different games. We can also expect to see some uniform gaming tokens developed so NFTs can be “cashed in” for a highly liquid token that can be traded on both decentralized and centralized trading exchanges.

Dapupp offers a Web3 social wallet designed as a secure, fast, low-cost, and interactive wallet for gamers. Users can create their digital identities inside the wallet and there is no seed phrase. It’s designed as a cross-platform social wallet for NFTs and crypto, with one-click onboarding. The non-custodial wallet supports thousands of tokens.

Advanced, Immersive Metaverses

Metaverses are becoming more and more immersive, interactive, and multipurpose. Many of the early-stage metaverses served as virtual rental universes, with tiles rented out for advertising and growth. The Sandbox and Decentraland are prominent metaverses that had a huge impact. But there are many more metaverses that are being created with distinctive use cases.

For instance, CaesarVerse aims to create a Metaverse centered around the Roman era. The historically accurate open-world setting is recreating a realistic environment so that university students and general enthusiasts can learn from the experience. This could be combined with VR components in the future for a real use case and direct application to the real world, via a virtual world.

In 2023, we can expect to see more immersive metaverses applied to distinct fields of study. The more immersive and enjoyable you can make a topic, the easier it is for students, and other classes of people, to retain it accurately.

Societal & Legal Acceptance

While gaming was once a fringe phenomenon separate from work, this is no longer the case. Gaming is a way to meet people and VR metaverses are platforms to launch projects, network, and do business. Gaming can also be a legitimate career for some.

The SEC recently lost its case against LBRY, which is regarded as a huge “win” for cryptocurrency advocates. It means that secondary market crypto sales (and, by extension, NFTs and tokens) are not securities and are, therefore, not under the jurisdiction of the SEC for regulatory purposes. The SEC injunction was deemed too broad and ambiguous to stand up.

With banks launching stablecoins and countries launching digital currencies, the world of finance will become increasingly cryptographic, which will become a standard means of exchange. This is good news for Web3 gaming, which relies heavily on crypto rewards. This acceptance should spur investment from larger firms.

Increased VR and AR Integration

It’s no great secret that the future of the planet is going to heavily involve AI, VR, and AR, for better or worse. Web3 games developers are hard at work to integrate VR and AR into blockchain-based architectures. We are currently in the testing phase, but like any software implementation, each iteration yields a better and better experience.

VR will enable gamers to explore detailed 3D environments, while AR will allow them to connect with real-world objects in novel ways. Both of these technologies are expected to become more accessible and easier to use, due to advances in hardware design, faster internet speeds, and better streaming capabilities.

We could also see a ping-pong effect where innovations in one field lead to the market demand for another. For instance, VR and AR will need super fast architectures to work on, encouraging more efficient architectures. This is positive news for internet-of-things-based cryptocurrencies such as IOTA which are designed for machine-to-machine communication.

What to Expect in 2023

In 2022, gaming accounted for 21% of all Web3 investment, at $8 Billion. Even though only 5.7% of Web3 applications and dApps are games, gaming activity makes up 52% of all Unique Active Wallets (UAW), a critical metric when gauging interest. While gaming investment took a dip in Q4 2022, the fundamental indicators point towards a thriving Web3 gaming ecosystem.

The wonderful thing about Web3 gaming is that development teams often don’t care about market incidents such as the FTX scandal. Because their core aim is the addition of features as opposed to the arbitrary increase of financial symbols, they can remain stoic in the face of market collapse.

Independent developers keep building while platters keep playing, regardless of wider economic factors.

This trend is set to continue and Web3 gaming is going to expand in 2023 and beyond.