Move over memecoins: Crypto ‘meme games’ coming, bagholders and all
AI could unleash a flood of short-lived crypto “meme games,” attracting the same speculative traders who helped push memecoins to record highs in late 2024, according to Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick.Speculative crypto games such as Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, where players compete for financial rewards, once took months to develop. But Warwick says AI tools have reduced the time and cost of creating similar games to just days and around $1,000.He predicts as many as 100,000 such games could launch within a year, with many designed to survive for only a few days — long enough for their creators to turn a profit.“Like you have serial deployers of memes, you’ll get serial deployers of games,” Warwick told Cointelegraph.But whether that flood would benefit crypto gaming and the broader industry is less clear. Cheaper development could make niche games viable and revive attention across the sector, but a wave of disposable crypto games could leave a lot of speculators “holding the bag.”“There will be ridiculous gains, and people will get absolutely f****ing rinsed,” Warwick wrote on X on Monday.A memecoin-style boom… and bust? In 2024, Pump.fun and similar launchpads helped fuel a surge in memecoins by making tokens easy to create. The sector’s combined market capitalization reached $150.6 billion in December 2024 before falling nearly 69% to $47.2 billion by November 2025, according to CoinGecko.The boom divided industry figures, with supporters championing memecoins’ appeal to traders while critics argued they diverted capital from useful projects and damaged crypto’s reputation.Warwick said he expects a similar speculative wave to touch crypto meme games.“These degens who are gambling in crypto, they get a thousand-dollar paycheck and they put $500 in Pump.Fun. You’re giving them a new venue and a new shiny wrapper … for them to be able to go and gamble.”Asked whether a mass of short-lived crypto games will ultimately be good for the crypto gaming ecosystem, Warwick said: “probably not.”“Like in the long run, I don’t think so. The sustainable model that Illuvium has been building towards for years, where really good quality games with ownership underneath, that I think is still the dream of where crypto gaming should be building towards.” Warwick said Illuvium’s flagship Overworld game has been in development for more than six years, with a revamped full release targeted for the first quarter of 2027.Animoca Brands and The Sandbox CEO Robby Yung took a similar view.“I think if there is a type of meme game, as Warwick is describing, that doesn’t particularly take much effort to make… I don’t think it would become a lasting category because user retention is the lifeblood of games and always has been,” he told Cointelegraph.More games, but where are the players? Meanwhile, Mirai Labs co-founder and CEO Corey Wilton questioned whether an AI-driven surge in supply can overcome weak demand for crypto games.“We shipped quite a few games, six or seven games, into the market,” Wilton said. “Ultimately, it came to the conclusion that the demand for or within the Web3 space simply isn’t there.”Dappradar’s tracking of gaming decentralized apps (Dapps) shows just $232.2 million in total value locked in 2,356 apps. A basket of the top 50 gaming tokens has a combined market capitalization of $3.8 billion at the time of writing.“I think the lack of demand and liquidity in so-called altcoins is definitely an issue, but I think, at the same time, there is also a lack of choice out there of really enjoyable, fun games that captivate people’s imaginations,” said Yung.“The reality is the number of game titles that use crypto is very small, and so there’s not a lot of choice for consumers. That makes it difficult to actually judge whether crypto is the issue or it’s just that there aren’t enough good games.”Recent crypto games show there is still interest in the sector despite recent pivots. The developers of Yield Fields, an upcoming web3 farming game built on the Robinhood chain, raised an estimated $8.3 million on Oct. 14 selling digital land plots as nonfungible tokens. The game is set to launch at the end of the month.AI game development hits cryptoMeanwhile, data shows AI has already entered crypto game development.In the Blockchain Game Alliance’s 2025 survey of 506 industry professionals, 32.8% said their company had implemented or experimented with AI for game design and content creation.Yung compared the arrival of AI development tools to the early days of mobile gaming, when cheaper development encouraged more studios to enter the market.“Frankly, I think that’s a great thing all around,” said Yung. “It reminds me a bit of when mobile first started to become popular around 2010. A lot of people started developing for mobile because it was much cheaper and much faster than developing for PC or console.”“People asked the same questions about whether the market would soon become flooded with games of lower quality. I think, frankly, what happened was we just got more games of all kinds of quality, and customers had a choice of playing what they liked.