New ATH of Concurrent Users on Steam, the Future of eSports Powered by Mobile & Global Games Spending Declined in 2022
Hello readers, happy new year! We hope you enjoyed the holidays and wish you a fruitful 2023.
On our side, we’ve been getting ready for what could be one of the most pivotal years in blockchain gaming. There’s going to be a lot more ground to cover from now on! So, as well as the regularly scheduled weekly newsletter on Thursday:
👁 Insights is a new sub-newsletter to Frontier Gaming Watch with mid to long form articles covering the industry’s bleeding edge out every Tuesday. You can unsubscribe from it at any time.
Without further ado, let’s get into this week’s news!
Steam Hits New Concurrent Users ATH
On January 9th, Steam hit a new record high with 33 millions users online on the platform at the same time, with 10 million players being in-game.
However, these high numbers are nothing new. Back in October 2022, the record was 30 million users, and one month in November the number rose to 31 million users! More and more gamers are coming online.
Future of eSports: Powered by Mobile
eSports is on the rise – in 2022 there were 532 million viewers worldwide and the global eSports market was valued at just over $1.38 billion. Indeed, as competitive games continue to permeate popular culture, we should be witnessing more and more large scale events like the recent PUBG Global Championships.
We have already covered the disruptive potential blockchain will have on this particular sector of the gaming industry here.
Rick Yang, partner at NEA, a VC investing in eSports claimed: “I actually think of esports as the mainstreaming of gaming, or the pop culture instantiation of gaming versus the pure idea of these players becoming professionals to compete at the highest levels.”
This touches on the important notion that the gaming industry is beginning to extend far beyond just teenagers playing in their bedroom. eSports is happening at the intersection of gaming, pop culture, media and commerce. As mentioned in a previous newsletter issue here, ‘gaming’ is taking on a new meaning. In fact, those who engage with games to play are now in the minority.
Mobile gaming continues to grow YoY, and it will most likely fuel the growth of the eSports industry by further reducing barriers to entry, allowing even more gamers and fans to pour in.
MUD, Engine for On-Chain Gaming by Lattice
When discussing most tooling and games in Web3, things are largely left to speculation. This is not the case for MUD and the team behind it at Lattice, who have already proved the viability of their product in practice by building OPCraft.
It is no secret that game engines greatly speed up the development process of a game, and it won’t be any different for games that are on-chain. MUD provides a great framework, and combined with a suite of libraries and networking tools, this new application standard will allow developers to save a ton of time. No need to reinvent the wheel!
As quoted from ‘The future of on-chain gaming: the promise of MUD ECS engine’ by Matchbox DAO:
“In the ’90s, after years of fragmented game development, something changed, and “genre-based” gaming engines and some efforts to develop general-purpose engines took the lead. Games like Doom and Unreal had core components that could be reused for creating many different games. Games with similar genres started to share many of their core logic implantations.
The cost and complexity of developing racing, fighting, and first-person-shooter games decreased in orders of magnitude. The impossible became possible, and generations of games and upgraded code have accumulated on top of each other. From a software perspective, this is one of the main reasons game development became a huge industry.”
Explanatory video:
If you want a more in-depth technical explanation, make sure to check out MUD’s own Introduction to the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern.
Treasure DAO Pioneers as Decentralised Publisher
Treasure really serves to demonstrate just how deeply blockchain technology will come to disrupt the gaming industry. Before getting into it, some of their most recently shared stats:
101% quarter-on-quarter growth (weekly active users)
$267m total Trove marketplace volume
100k+ engaged player community
95% of all gaming and NFT transactions on Arbitrum
When joining a thriving games ecosystem such as this one, indie developers can come experiment with creating new game formats; gain access to an already engaged player base; collaborate with other builders; leverage the network through cross-game partnerships to drive player engagement, for instance; and benefit from shared infrastructure and a unified unit of account ($MAGIC).
Global Games Spending Declines in 2022
Global Browser games spending declined 16.7% with $2.3 billion spent in 2022, much different to the Mobile sector which only declined 6.4% with $92.2 billion spent last year.
Only PC games spending increased from year to year.
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