I want to tell you what a dumpster fire investing in crypto gaming is, and give you some better ideas instead. First, why do I absolutely detest investing in crypto games? And have I done it myself? Yes. I've lost thousands of dollars investing in crypto games.
Most crypto games are Web3 theater
The first thing you need to understand in crypto is that almost all the games in crypto are not actually even on the blockchain, aside from tokens and hashes for NFTs. Almost everything else is hosted on centralized computing, which means there's complete decentralization Web3 theater happening in almost all of crypto games. They're basically just the same old games we already have, plus a blockchain token. They're not fully on chain. They don't deliver the promise of a real Web3 game.
But even worse than that, think about what a gigantic waste of time playing video games is. When you combine cryptocurrency projects, which generally have almost no personal responsibility or accountability — where anyone can just create a coin and claim they're building a game — you have levels upon levels of waste here. You have people investing in crypto, where most altcoins are going to go to zero. Then they're investing in games, games that for the most part aren't even on the blockchain, and most video games are an utter flop and failure. And then third, the underlying thing being invested in is people basically wasting their time on a game instead of participating in real life.
The opportunity cost of video games
If I look back at my life, there are two areas where I would love to see what my life looks like without them. One is alcohol. Drinking alcohol is one of the biggest scams out there. It takes and takes and steals from you, takes your life energy, drains the health of your body. How sick is it that people prefer being poisoned by alcohol to facing life sober? As an alcoholic who's sober 10 years now, I know what a scam that is. Alcohol is the worst thing that's ever happened in my life.
And the second worst thing that's ever happened in my life is video games. I played tens of thousands of hours of video games in my life — especially when you combine them with alcohol. I'd love to see all the things I could have done instead. The biggest problem with video games is the opportunity cost. What else could you have done in your life? My God, I could have done so much with the rest of my life besides dumping tens of thousands of hours into getting my Counter-Strike kill-death ratio up to three and winning all these pointless matches.
I even got to be a professional gamer, earning over $100,000 in 2021 and getting to be pretty well known on Facebook Gaming and YouTube. And it all disappeared pretty quickly. Why? Because I got to hate playing video games every day. I got to see how useless video games are. Video games often put you in this competitive me-versus-the-world separate mind state, which is why they go so well with addiction, and why people often mix addictions up with gaming — drinking and smoking a bunch of weed while they play. So do you think investing in that is making a better world? Do you want to bet your returns on people throwing their lives away on a so-called crypto game? This is one reason I've come to see crypto gaming the way I do — it's a lot like the way I think crypto is basically Call of Duty Warzone, and ICP wins.
If you've invested in crypto gaming, to me this is an opportunity to rethink your investment strategy and rethink what kind of world you want to create. Almost everybody who's invested in crypto gaming has lost money, and that's a chance to see the crypto matrix that's ripping you off — to see that anyone can start a crypto gaming project and never actually deliver a game.
How easy it is to fake a game
Most crypto gaming projects have never even released a real game. They literally start a coin up, talk about the game they're making, and put out some videos. Do you realize how easy it is to fake building a real game? There are free resources on Unreal Engine — free assets and little things you can try out and customize. People who really are into the gaming world will see a crypto coin putting out footage from Unreal Engine, basically the free resources with tiny amounts of customization, and they can see how fraudulent it is. There have been big projects called out for being a blatant scam: they took the free Unreal Engine stuff, made minimal customizations, and then talked up the game they were developing. That's how bad crypto gaming is.
So to me, if there's one area you really want to stay away from in crypto investing, it's gaming. And I'd generally suggest that if anyone you're watching is encouraging you to buy gaming tokens, you avoid watching them as well — because if they've never thought about crypto gaming this way, you don't want to take your cues from a content creator who hasn't considered this aspect of it. If you want to see how I think about coins instead, I keep these conversations going in my Money playlist.
If you don't even play games, why are you investing?
The ultimate bottom line for crypto gaming investing is this: if you don't even play video games, what are you doing investing in crypto games? So many of you have told me you invest in crypto games and you don't even play video games yourself. That's insane. Anything you're investing in, you should be in the middle of getting to know.
I'd extend this to things like stocks. If you own stock in a company like Walmart or Amazon, I hope you actually shop there, so you can get a feel for what kind of business they really have. The most basic way to do your own research when you invest in crypto is to use whatever it is you're investing in. So if you don't play crypto games, you absolutely should never, ever be investing in crypto games. And even if you do play them, I hope you actually play the game before you buy the token. Because even then, you can still get ripped off.
I did the research on Gods Unchained and still lost
I lost thousands and thousands of dollars buying Gods Unchained. It was one of the most hyped-up, well-funded crypto games, and I bought a lot of it after they actually sponsored two of my live streams on Twitch. I bought a bunch of the GODS token at a dollar. Yeah, that didn't work out well for me. Keep in mind, at the time I was a gaming streamer — it was the main thing I was doing — and I actually played the game itself, and then I bought the token. I still got ripped off doing that amount of research. So if you're not doing at least that much research, you have no business buying the thing to start with.
And this is almost every crypto game: it does nothing but go down. Usually the team and the insiders — the seed investors — have endless tokens to dump, and there's almost no utility to holding the token itself. Many of these crypto games don't even use the token on the marketplace for the NFTs that aren't even hosted on chain. I know this sounds shockingly bad, and you'd wonder how anybody could get ripped off by these. What happens with something like Gods Unchained is what looks to me like very intentional, manipulated pumps: insiders buy a whole bunch of tokens to push the price up, and then proceed to dump as much as possible, which is why the price constantly drops. It pumps up to thirty-something cents and people immediately dump it again. A lot of these tokens are insanely manipulated, and in my opinion absolutely horrible investments. It's one more reason I've come to believe 99% of crypto is theft.
Even if you actually do your own research, it's still easy to get ripped off on these, so I would never buy a crypto gaming token unless you actually play it, you love it, and it's really on chain.
The one gaming token I'd even consider
Right now there's only one crypto gaming token I think could even be decent, and that's called Dragginz. It's going to be the first fully on-chain MMO on the Internet Computer. But I'm not holding any Dragginz, for two reasons: the game's not out yet, and I'm not going to invest in crypto gaming anymore.
What I'd rather invest in: Internet Computer
What I think the best thing to invest in is something with the most asymmetric risk, which to me is Internet Computer Protocol. ICP is the first real third-generation blockchain. I've done a lot of videos on it across my channel, but I'd rather hold Internet Computer Protocol than any other crypto. Why? Because in my opinion the odds of this going up are extremely high. I believe this could easily 100x or more. I get 14%-plus APR on my ICP while I'm staking it, so I can live indefinitely off the principal. The market cap at $4 billion, compared to what the technology can do, is light-years different from investing in something like a crypto game. To me this is the most powerful, advanced, and scalable layer-one technology in the world.
I know that because I've looked, and looked, and looked. Almost everyone else who claims their layer-one technology is the most advanced and scalable is, in my view, either lying, has never actually looked, or is intentionally ignoring Internet Computer. So to me, Internet Computer is my idea of an ideal investment, and that's why I have almost 5,000 of the tokens — around $40,000 today. This is also why I've come to sell altcoins for ICP rather than chase the next gaming coin.
My next pick: Tagger
My next ideal investment after that is Tagger, because Tagger is a social media platform built on ICP that I actually use every single day. It's fully functional, fully on chain, with a real utility and a real business system — something I can actually use, and something that could scale huge, because it's simply a way better deal than using regular social media. There are people who are going to value that heavily. As more people get off of and delete these other social media platforms, and the more they see they're just getting exploited, the more they'll look for alternatives like this. Most people just don't realize it exists yet.
By holding Tagger, you get paid every week in ICP from the business system. So instead of dumping $16 a month into X and having no share and no real control myself, I have about 1,115 Tagger tokens — 0.37% of the whole supply. This is a baby market cap. That gives me a real ownership stake, because it's fully on chain. To me, this is what I want to invest in: something I actually use every day, something that plays a useful role in my life. Internet Computer, Tagger, and OpenChat all play a genuinely useful role in my life. I use them every single day. Occasionally, if I go on vacation, I'll miss a day, but probably nine out of ten days I actually use these, and they're better than any other option I've found.
The bottom line
Compare that to something like crypto gaming, where most people investing are just purely hoping to get rich without even doing their own research. To me, that's an absolute dumpster fire. This is exactly why I suggest you never invest in crypto gaming — almost anything else is better.
I'd genuinely like to get to know you and hear your story, because that's how I come up with ideas for videos and how I stay accountable. You can tell me what you think about crypto gaming, ask me questions about specific coins in your portfolio, and let me know how you found me. If you want to talk it through with me directly, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and bring your questions.