Despite huge investment, metaverse games are reportedly struggling to retain players

Despite the high level of investment by companies around the world, metaverse games are struggling to retain players, according to a new report.

As compiled by Coin Desk, metaverse titles are struggling to provide players with reasons to continue to engage with the game.

Metaverse title Axie Infinity has seen an average daily user drop of 30% to around 107,240. Another title, The Sandbox, has fallen 29% to around 1,180.

“There is currently no organic engagement that retains players in the game, unlike traditional games like Fortnite, GTA, Candy Crush, where players are willing to pay to keep playing,” Blockchain Gaming Analyst analyst DeFi Vader wrote when discussing Axe Infinity.

As Coin Desk points out, the daily user number for a game in the metaverse can be misleading. While some of that number will be players, others will be “employees of guilds playing the game to earn yield for investors.”

One of the main barriers to entry for core players is the perception that NFT integration into mainstream games would result in pay-to-win elements.

In a report by crypto research firm Messari (paywalled, transcribed by Coin Desk) Mason Nystrom wrote that “First, the ability to purchase NFTs or in-game currency effectively creates pay-to-win game mechanics, a quality that most major franchises and successful games avoid,”.

Coin Desk’s report even cites Ubisoft‘s crypto experiment, Ubisoft Quartz as an example of a mainstream games company failing to enter the crypto space.

Billed by Ubisoft as “the first platform for playable and energy-efficient NFTs in AAA games”, Quartz was originally revealed in December 2021 and was quickly met with overwhelming backlash by players.

Despite this, a statement on the Ubisoft Quartz website tells players that the publisher will continue to add ‘Digits’ – its equivalent of NFTs – to future games.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint was the first game to get Digits, and the statement claims that even though it won’t be getting any more, there will be more games in the future that support them.