AI Could Turn Crypto Games Into the Next Memecoins

• 22 October 2026
• |
• 15:26

Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick expects AI to trigger a wave of cheap, short-lived crypto “meme games,” but the industry was already losing studios and struggling to find players.

Key Takeaways

• Warwick: up to 100,000 games within a year
• Estimated build cost: days and around $1,000
• Web3 gaming funding: $293 million in 2025
• 27.1% of professionals cite user acquisition problems

Warwick made the forecast in interviews Cointelegraph published on October 22, citing Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, crypto games where players compete for financial rewards, as titles that once took months to build.

“Like you have serial deployers of memes, you’ll get serial deployers of games,” Warwick said.

Built to survive a few days

Warwick said many of these games would be designed to last only a few days, long enough for their creators to turn a profit. He expects them to attract the same speculative traders who bought memecoins, giving them another place to gamble.

The market he is comparing them with peaked and then lost most of its value. CoinGecko data shows total memecoin market cap reached $150.6 billion in December 2024 and stood at $47.2 billion by November 2025, a fall of about 69%. Launchpads such as Pump.fun made tokens cheap to create, and Warwick expects AI to do the same for games.

Warwick runs a studio built on the opposite model. Illuvium’s flagship Overworld has been in development for more than six years, with a revamped full release targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Asked whether a wave of short-lived games would help crypto gaming in the long run, he said it probably would not.

Developers get paid at launch

The games Warwick describes collect most of their money at the start, through an opening token or item sale. A game funded by repeat purchases needs players to return next month. A game funded at launch has been paid before its first week of retention data exists. When building the next one takes days, starting over can make more sense to its creator than maintaining a game whose players are drifting away.

The rewards that bring in early players need aissued tokens dilute existing holders, and fee-funded rewards shrink when activity drops. Each can keep a game looking busy while the payouts continue

Reward-led growth already has a record. The Blockchain Game Alliance’s 2025 State of the Industry Report concluded that airdrops, token generation events, questing systems and reward farms drove short onboarding surges but did not turn new users into loyal players.

Even funded games could not hold players

The same report surveyed 506 industry professionals. Lack of funding was the most common company challenge, named by 32.6%, while 27.1% cited user acquisition and 24.9% cited retention. Investment in blockchain gaming fell to an estimated $293 million in 2025, from more than $10 billion at the 2022 peak, according to figures the report attributes to DappRadar and other trackers.

Studios with budgets far above $1,000 still struggled to keep an audience. Tokyo Beast closed two months after its 2025 launch, and Pirate Nation cited its inability to maintain enough active players when it exited. Mirai Labs co-founder and CEO Corey Wilton told Cointelegraph his studio released six or seven games before concluding that demand within Web3 was not there.

In his opening letter to the report, BGA co-president Sébastien Borget wrote that player activity is split across platforms and chains, which makes discovery and distribution harder. A wave of disposable releases would compete for that same divided audience.

Yung blames the shortage of good games

Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung reads the demand problem differently. He argued that crypto gaming offers so few enjoyable titles that it is hard to tell whether crypto is the obstacle or the games are. He compared AI tools with mobile gaming around 2010, when lower costs drew more studios in and players ended up choosing from more games of every quality.

That case favours more experimentation, and the tools are already in studios: 32.8% of BGA respondents said their companies had used or tested AI for game design and content creation. Yung does not extend the argument to the disposable titles Warwick describes, which he expects to fade because “user retention is the lifeblood of games and always has been.”

Wallet counts cannot separate players from farmers

Whichever reading proves right, the first evidence will come from on-chain dashboards, and those count addresses. DappRadar’s methodology tracks unique wallets interacting with a game’s smart contracts, so a reward claim, token swap, NFT purchase or marketplace listing all register. One person can run many wallets, while players who never make a transaction do not appear at all.

For reward-based games, bots are the obvious risk. AI-enabled cheating, bots and exploits was the most common worry about AI among BGA respondents, cited by 38.9%. FunFair Ventures partner Frederico Kessler told the report’s researchers that wallet-interaction figures from earlier cycles often reflected automated or financially motivated activity. He put a realistic target for many Web3 teams at a few hundred thousand monthly active users, a count of people instead of addresses.

Sector totals carry the same gap. DappRadar tracks $232.2 million locked across 2,356 gaming apps, a measure of money held in contracts that does not show how many people played this week.

Two clocks to watch

Warwick’s forecast runs on a 12-month clock. If he is right, the 2,356 gaming apps DappRadar tracks today should look small by October 2027, even if many disposable titles are never submitted for listing.

Each game in that wave runs on a far shorter clock, and the figures that matter arrive in a fixed order.

Sale proceeds and wallet counts are at their highest. Both are recorded before anyone has had a reason to return.

The first return rate can be measured, provided the developer counts gameplay separately from reward claims.

The share of first-week players still active shows whether the game outlasted its launch traffic.

Activity after payouts fall shows how many users were playing and how many were collecting.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Game tokens and digital items can lose value, and advertised rewards may change.