Study: Blockchain gaming market set to surpass $614 billion by 2030

The global blockchain gaming market is projected to rise from $154.5 billion to $614.9 billion by 2030. Fortune Business Insights researchers forecast this trajectory, via Fortune Business Insights.

They estimate an average annual growth rate of 21.8% in the sale of in-game items such as NFTs over this period.

“Blockchain technology has revolutionised the gaming industry, enabling secure and transparent transactions, innovative gameplay mechanics and new ways of interacting”, the researchers said.

They view rising NFT popularity, the appeal of Play-to-Earn models, and mobile-game integration as the sector’s main drivers. Smartphone users are already the largest demographic group of gamers, making them an ideal platform for further development, the experts noted.

In terms of GameFi-type applications, they forecast the strongest growth for RPGs. They argue that RPGs feature “individual characters, themes, additional weapons and other features,” which makes them best suited to realise blockchain-enabled capabilities.

In 2022, RPGs accounted for 33.8% of the Web3-gaming market, worth $128.6 billion, ahead of multiplayer and collectible games.

A factor that could dampen sector growth is possible tightening of regulation around cryptocurrencies, NFTs and virtual economies overall, Fortune Business Insights said.

Experts also noted that, according to the Blockchain Game Alliance, 51% of players find connecting to blockchain apps sufficiently difficult, and 37.2% cited weak gameplay as a problem.

In the five years since the emergence of GameFi, around 2,127 of 2,817 projects in the segment (~75.5%) have failed, according to CoinGecko.