- AI tools could drive a surge in short-term blockchain games as the cost of making them falls to about $1,000, opening the door to more meme games built for quick profits.
- Warwick said as many as 100,000 meme games could emerge over a year, with some generating huge profits but many investors at risk of being completely wiped out.
- Warwick and Yung said meme games are unlikely to be sustainable, and stressed that high-quality games built on asset ownership and strong user retention will be critical.
Forecast Trend Report by Period
Artificial intelligence is lowering the time and cost required to build blockchain games, raising the prospect of a surge in short-term “meme games” aimed at quick profits. Industry participants are warning of a speculative frenzy similar to the meme-coin boom, while also noting that easier development could broaden users’ choices.
Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick said AI tools could produce speculative games such as Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy in a matter of days for about $1,000, Cointelegraph reported on October 22. The same work previously took months.
Warwick said as many as 100,000 meme games could emerge over the next year. “Just like there are deployers churning out meme tokens one after another, there will be deployers churning out games one after another,” he said. “Some people will make huge profits, but a lot of people will get completely wiped out.” He also suggested many of the games could operate for only a few days, built mainly to generate short-term profits for their creators.
Warwick pointed to the meme-coin market as a comparison. According to CoinGecko, the sector’s total market capitalization rose to $150.6 billion in December 2024 before dropping about 69% to $47.2 billion in November 2025. He said a sustainable model would be high-quality games built around asset ownership.
Animoca Brands Chief Executive Officer Robbie Yung also said user retention would be the deciding factor. He said meme games were unlikely to become a sustainable category and that games made too easily would struggle to meet the core requirement of retaining users. Mirai Labs co-founder and CEO Corey Wilton said that after launching several games, he had concluded there was not enough demand in the Web3 space itself.
Yung, however, was positive on the spread of AI development tools. He said that in the early days of mobile gaming in 2010, there were similar concerns that low-quality titles would flood the market, but the result was a wider range of games and more choice for users. In a 2025 survey by the Blockchain Game Alliance, 32.8% of respondents said they had adopted or were experimenting with AI for game design and content creation.
