This month i had the pleasure of meeting with the DappRadar team at the CGC conference in Ukraine. Among all the talented people the group consists of, Jon Jordan was also there, Communications Director at DappRadar.com and Editor at BlockchainGamer.Biz.
I spotted him at the Official CGC party, standing next to the door, with a Corona in hand, and I immediately introduced myself.
We had a great chat under the sound of electronic music, and in the end, I was happy to meet a guy whos work has an impact on the industry. Blockchain Gaming needs the right media, as much as it requires good games.
Jon has much information to share when it comes to blockchain gaming and dapps space, and it would be a shame to keep them for myself, so we organized an interview with essential questions most crypto gamers have today!
Without further ado, let’s get to the interview!
Jon, It’s great to have you with us today. It was a pleasure to meet you at CGC. I noticed you are a well-known person in the space. Everyone knows Jon Jordan. 🙂 But what about the man behind this name? We want to know more about you! Who are you, and why you do what you do?
I’ve been the games industry for 20 years now, everything from PC/console to mobile games. It’s an industry that really fascinated me, especially the combination of art, technology, and business.
And that’s why I’m now into blockchain games. I think it’s currently the most interesting part of gaming.
You have been in the blockchain gaming space for a long time, how do you keep track of data and news when there are so many upcoming games?
Compared to other game sectors, blockchain gaming is actually small, and a lot of the developers know each other. It’s a pretty friendly space.
In terms of keeping track of what’s going on, it’s the usual sources – Twitter, YouTube, websites. I sign up for a lot of email lists. For games I’m really interested in, I’ll join their Discord.
And, of course, when it comes to tracking data, DappRadar’s games category is invaluable.
Tell us about DappRadar, what is it that you guys do there? And how do you do it! Tracking so many dapps and blockchain should be a difficult task to accomplish.
The goal for DappRadar is simple – to accurately track the data of all dapps – games, DeFi, gambling etc – across all public blockchains that support smart contracts.
Of course, this is much more complex to accomplish as you have to track what’s going on with each dapp’s smart contracts, and then also deal with issues such as fake traffic from bots.
We currently track almost 2,700 dapps and over 13,000 smart contracts across eight blockchains, and these numbers are increasing every day.
We recently discussed True Volume Data that is now available on DappRadar, what can you tell us about this? Our readers would love to know!
Previously, when we were tracking dapps on EOS, we were just tracking the volumes of the EOS cryptocurrency, not other EOS-based tokens.
Now, however, we’re tracking all tokens running on the EOS blockchain, including dapp specific tokens such as the PGL token used by the game Prospectors. This gives a much more accurate view of how value is being created on EOS.
We’ll be adding this feature for dapps on Ethereum and TRON over the coming weeks.
What’s your view on the current status of Blockchain Gaming? After nearly two years since the first NFT was introduced, where are we standing?
It’s a very good question. We all thought (or hoped) one or more blockchain games would have gone mass market by now. Instead, we have four games, each with a couple of thousand players. That’s not a lot of players compared to mobile or console.
What is encouraging, however, is games such as My Crypto Heroes seem to be sustaining solid trading volumes in terms of players buying and selling NFTs. For me, that’s the core of what blockchain gaming is really about.
There was a rumor that eventually became a fact, many dapps are trying to manipulate their data with bots. How big is the problem? In which blockchains? Are there games involved or only gambling ones?
Bots are a pretty complex issue. Some dapp developers are using their own bots to inflate their user numbers. Some players are using bots to get more in-game rewards. Personally, my starting assumption for all dapps is they’ll have some measure of bot activity.
The trick is to work out how much and for that you need to think why someone would want to use bots? For blockchains such as Ethereum and TRON, it’s very easy to make new wallets, so potentially, they will have a lot of bots. For EOS, it’s harder as you have to spend EOS to create a new wallet, but we know there are a lot of bots on EOS too.
In terms of categories, we know there are a lot of bots for gambling dapps as they often give daily rewards for wallets that log in. But any dapp with similar mechanics will likely have a lot of bots.
How do you spot fake data on DappRadar? Are there any “penalties” for those apps?
Yes, we actively filter dapps for suspicious traffic and remove it. I don’t want to say too much about how we do it for obvious reasons. Also, just as bots are always changing and getting clever, so our bot tracking needs to improve too constantly.
Hybrid Games vs Dapp Games, which ones will become mainstream first?
If you’re talking about player numbers, hybrid games – that is, games with centralized and decentralized elements – have a much better chance of going big because they can onboard lots of players without deals with wallets and private keys, etc.
We already see this with a game like My Crypto Heroes, which has around 3,000 players using blockchain elements, and around 6,000 players playing the off-chain elements.
Any growth data or observations you could share with us since CryptoKitties came out?
Personally, I think that CryptoKitties remains the most interesting blockchain game in terms of how it’s managed to create a marketplace for NFTs that remains fairly buoyant.
Obviously, the number of active players has dropped over time, but the hardcore fans continue to breed and trade, so I think that as a blockchain game, it remains pretty successful.
Without any data to prove this, I believe that right now, there are more investors and blockchain developers than actual gamers and game developers in the industry. How far am I from the truth?
Yes, at the absolute maximum, I’d say there are around 100,000 people who are interested in blockchain or crypto games and maybe 10,000 active players in terms of people playing a game every day. That compares to over 2 billion gamers on mobile. So, we’re a tiny market at the moment.
But that doesn’t mean things can’t change very quickly. Once gamers start to understand they can buy something in a game and then sell (or gift) it to another player, they will demand it from all games.
What would you suggest to a new blockchain gamer?
Don’t spend too much money. Because we talk about the value of owning your items, many people think blockchain games are about making money, like owning Bitcoin. For most people, that’s not the case, however.
Pick 5 of your favorite blockchain games.
The games I’m playing the most at the moment are: Crypto Sword & Magic, CryptoAssault My Crypto Heroes, and EOS Knights.
The games I’m most looking forward to playing are Gods Unchained, Crypto Space Commander, and Light Trails Rush.
Lastly, here’s a question I always like to ask people. Where will blockchain gaming be in 5 years from now?
Let’s put it this way.
I think Joe Lubin will have won his bet with Jimmy Song (that by 2023, at least five dapps will have +10,000 DAUs, +100,000 MAUs), and blockchain games will be the reason why.
DAU: Daily Active Users
MAU: Monthly Active Users
Thank you, everyone, for reading this interview! Also, i would like to thank the DappRaddar team as well as Jon Jordan for taking his time to answer the questions. Until next time, keep it crypto.