Dimensionals Quits Web3 Gaming - Does it Mean Anything?

In short, no. But first, let's take a look at at a few excerpts from a rather lengthy diatribe on Twitter posted by Sash MacKinnon (CEO of Mino Games, the team behind the Dimensionals game), explaining why they have decided to leave the web3 space.

The Twitter post had a very heavy, ‘sour grapes’ feel to it, with rants against numerous aspects of web3 gaming. On paragraph in particular I wanted to call out reads as follows:

The first of the valuable lessons that I learned from the experience was that the web3 audience is not representative of the average gamer. They are proud traders and collectors – folks who like to participate and profit in a free-market. The explicit incentive is to profit and to appeal to this audience requires a game where the core design is focused on profiteering. Moreover, this is a niche audience compared to the overall gaming audience and the total audience size of this niche has not meaningfully grown in the last 18 months.

Wow. While I disagree with this statement, I do appreciate the directness and insight into their thought process. In short, he is saying that web3 gaming is ALL about making money first and foremost. And that if your game isn't specifically designed around creating profit for the players, then you may as well give up.

He is also claiming that the web3 gaming audience hasn't grown meaningfully in the last 18 months! Ha! I don't know if he could have possibly been more inaccurate with this statement. Perhaps THEIR audience hasn't grown in the past 18 months, but to claim that there has been no growth at all in the web3 gaming market is just absurd!

Immutable Passport has over 2 millions sign-ups, Telegram games are pulling in hundreds of thousands of users, and all of the top 10 most-played games are pulling in over 240k users per week, with Pixels pushing close to 1 million users every week!

This is most certainly not a downtrend in web3 gaming!

And really, Sash MacKinnon tries to put the blame on everyone else. It's the markets, it's bots swarming their free mint, it's optional royalties on some of the larger NFT marketplaces, it's the community scamming each other, it's the players getting angry, it's negativity towards web3 tech.

Strangely, thousands of other web3 games have to deal with the same issues, and yet somehow, they find a way to handle it.

Among other things, Sash also said,

web3 games currently have no distribution, no marketing and no audience outside the web3 niche.

Again, a statement I strongly disagree with. I mean, after all, you can find web3 games on the Google Play and Apple stores! What distribution markets are bigger than that!?

There is more I could argue with from the Tweet, but I will leave it at that. You can read the original tweet here - https://x.com/sashamackinnon/status/1825457069668934036

Final Thoughts on Dimensionals Moving to Web2

While I feel for those who spend sweat, time, and energy on a project that fails, when a game developer tries to put the blame for that failure on the players, you know something is rotten.

Now, don't get me wrong. Web3 gaming is far from perfect. Bots are certainly an ongoing problem, especially when it's possible to extract value from a game. And game economies are regularly undergoing changes and rebalancing as web3 dev teams work on creating something that really hasn't been done before.

But nonetheless, I still strongly feel that web3 gaming is the future. And while not every game will have, or need, integration with blockchain technology, web3 games will become more accepted and commonplace over the next few years.

Rather than a trend, the folding of Dimensionals as a web3 game is an outlier. Many web3 games are thriving. And while there will always be some who don't make it, overall, I couldn't feel more optimistic about the future of web3 gaming than I do now!