Crypto 'meme games' set to explode: The next frontier after memecoins
According to Illuvium's Kieran Warwick, artificial intelligence technology may enable the creation of up to 100,000 crypto 'meme games' in the coming year, bringing both opportunities and risks.
The same type of speculative trading community that drove memecoins to unprecedented peaks in late 2024 could soon be drawn to a wave of ephemeral crypto 'meme games' enabled by artificial intelligence, suggests Kieran Warwick, co-founder of Illuvium.
Games built around speculation in the crypto space, like Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, which pit players against each other for monetary prizes, previously required months of development work. However, according to Warwick, AI-powered tools have compressed both the timeline and expense of building comparable games down to mere days and approximately $1,000.
Warwick's projection suggests that up to 100,000 of these games might emerge over the next 12 months, with numerous titles engineered to exist for just a handful of days — sufficient time for developers to extract profits.
"Like you have serial deployers of memes, you'll get serial deployers of games," Warwick told Cointelegraph.
However, the question of whether this deluge would prove advantageous for crypto gaming and the wider ecosystem remains uncertain. While reduced development costs might enable niche gaming concepts to become economically feasible and rekindle interest throughout the sector, an avalanche of throwaway crypto games risks leaving numerous 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?
Throughout 2024, platforms like Pump.fun along with comparable launchpads contributed to an explosion of memecoins by streamlining token creation. The combined market capitalization of the sector climbed to $150.6 billion in December 2024 before plummeting nearly 69% to $47.2 billion by November 2025, according to CoinGecko.
The explosive growth created division among industry leaders, with proponents celebrating memecoins' attraction for traders while detractors contended they siphoned capital away from projects with utility and harmed the reputation of cryptocurrency.
According to Warwick, he anticipates a comparable wave of speculation will impact 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."
When questioned about whether a proliferation of short-lived crypto games would ultimately prove beneficial for the crypto gaming ecosystem, Warwick responded: "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."
According to Warwick, Illuvium's primary Overworld game has undergone development for over six years, with a completely revamped full launch planned for the first quarter of 2027.
Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands, expressed a comparable perspective.
"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?
At the same time, Corey Wilton, co-founder and CEO of Mirai Labs, raised concerns about whether an AI-fueled increase in supply can address the weak demand facing 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."
According to Dappradar's monitoring of gaming decentralized apps (Dapps), there's only $232.2 million in total value locked across 2,356 apps. At the time of writing, a collection of the top 50 gaming tokens holds a combined market capitalization of $3.8 billion.
"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."
Despite recent industry shifts, recent crypto game launches demonstrate continued interest in the sector. On Oct. 14, the development team behind Yield Fields, a forthcoming web3 farming game constructed on the Robinhood chain, generated an estimated $8.3 million through sales of digital land plots as nonfungible tokens. The game's launch is scheduled for the end of the month.
AI game development hits crypto
Meanwhile, available data indicates that AI has already made inroads into crypto game development.
According to the Blockchain Game Alliance's 2025 survey covering 506 industry professionals, 32.8% reported that their company had implemented or experimented with AI for game design and content creation.
Yung drew parallels between the emergence of AI development tools and the nascent era of mobile gaming, when reduced development costs encouraged greater numbers of studios to participate in 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."