AI could set off a flood of short-lived crypto “meme games,” drawing in the same speculative crowd that helped send memecoins to record levels in late 2024, according to Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick.
Warwick said speculative crypto games such as Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, where players compete for financial rewards, once took months to build. With AI tools, he said, similar projects can now be made in a matter of days for around $1,000.
He expects as many as 100,000 of these games could launch within a year. Many, in his telling, may be built to survive only for a few days, just 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.
Whether that kind of surge would help crypto gaming, or the wider industry, is much less certain. Lower development costs could make niche titles viable and pull attention back to the sector. A wave of disposable crypto games, though, could also leave many speculators holding the bag.
Warwick wrote on X on Monday: “There will be ridiculous gains, and people will get absolutely f***ing rinsed.”
A memecoin-style boom, then a drop
In 2024, Pump.fun and similar launchpads helped drive a memecoin surge by making token creation easy. According to CoinGecko, the sector’s combined market capitalization reached $150.6 billion in December 2024, then fell nearly 69% to $47.2 billion by November 2025.
That run split opinion across the industry. Supporters pointed to memecoins’ appeal for traders, while critics said they pulled capital away from projects with clearer utility and hurt crypto’s reputation.
Warwick said he expects a similar speculative wave to reach 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 would ultimately be good for the crypto gaming ecosystem, Warwick said: “probably not.”
He added that Illuvium’s flagship title, Overworld, has been in development for more than six years, with a revamped full release targeted for the first quarter of 2027.
Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung took a similar line.
“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,” Yung told Cointelegraph.
More games may arrive, but demand is still in question
Mirai Labs co-founder and CEO Corey Wilton questioned whether an AI-driven jump in supply can solve 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, or Dapps, shows $232.2 million in total value locked across 2,356 apps. At the time of writing, a basket of the top 50 gaming tokens carried a combined market capitalization of $3.8 billion.
Yung said weak demand and liquidity in so-called altcoins is clearly part of the problem, but he also argued that the market still lacks enough genuinely enjoyable games that can capture players’ imagination.
In his view, the number of game titles using crypto remains very small, leaving consumers with limited choice. That makes it hard to judge whether crypto itself is the issue, or whether there simply are not enough good games yet.
Recent launches suggest interest in the sector has not disappeared even after several 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 through sales of digital land plots as nonfungible tokens. The game is scheduled to launch at the end of the month.
AI is already showing up in crypto game development
Industry data suggests AI is no longer theoretical in this segment.
In the Blockchain Game Alliance’s 2025 survey of 506 industry professionals, 32.8% said their company had implemented or experimented with AI in game design and content creation.
Yung compared the arrival of AI development tools with the early years of mobile gaming, when cheaper production costs encouraged more studios to enter the market.
“Frankly, I think that’s a great thing all around,” Yung said. “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.”
He said people asked similar questions at the time about whether the market would be flooded with lower-quality games. What followed, in his account, was a broader range of games across different quality levels, with customers free to choose what they wanted to play.
