Discontinued games: Q1 2024

The first quarter of 2024 is over, and the Big Blockchain Game List has gathered data on new blockchain games as well as discontinued games to spot general ecosystem trends.

In Q1 2024, the single chains losing the most games during the quarter were Solana and Polygon.

As the tracking of discontinued games is an imprecise and lagging indicator, it’s likely that the data captured here reflects the relative weakness of both the Solana and Polygon ecosystems during 2023. As ever, there are always more blockchain games in development and looking for funding than the market can sustain so this level of discontinued product is not a surprise. 

If anything, the surprise is that the attrition rate isn’t higher. For example, we noted 410 games discontinued in 2023, so 2024’s rate to-date reflects the sector’s improving sentiment.

Despite 60 discontinued games during Q1 2024, the blockchain gaming industry demonstrated continued strong net growth even through the 2023 bear market. As our data shows, the Big List ended Q1 2024 tracking a total of 953 blockchain games, which compares to 896 games at the end of 2023, 824 games at the end of June 2023, and 724 games at the end of January 2023.

Notably, discontinued games are not the only factor why the number of games in an ecosystem declines. Chain migrations remained a strong trend during Q1 too, with a total of 29 games announcing migrations or expansions to other blockchains.

In terms of larger movements, the top group contained 11 games onboarded by Immutable, followed by 10 games announcing they were leaving Polygon. But while Polygon is currently declining the most, and Immutable is growing the most, it is worth pointing out that this trend is mainly just optics, as Immutable is onboarding games to its zkEVM infrastructure, which runs Polygon’s zkEVM blockchain under-the-hood.

The third biggest group contained 7 games which were expanding to adopt multichain deployment.

The more significant trend is the continuing decline of non-EVM blockchains such as Solana, Ton, Sui, Wax etc, which now consists of under 10% of all blockchain games. Indeed, many of these blockchains are now deploying EVM-compatibility.