An analysis released by Levan Kvirkvelia, founder of Jigger, an antibot protection software, has shown that 40% of the players’ base of Web 3.0 games are bots. The study found evidence of 20 thousand in more than 60 web 3.0 games.
Bots may be used to improve the rating of games and attract the attention of users – which naturally results in the valuation of the game, attracting great investments to the industry. An example is the gaming startup Limit Break, which on August 29 raised US$200 million.
Furthermore, according to a report by Dove Metrics and Messari, the crypto industry received US$ 30.3 billion in the first half of 2022 alone. That figure surpassed 2021’s US$ 30.2 billion. The material highlights that the NFT gaming vertical raised more than four times as much capital as any other non-fungible token segment.
Kvirkvelia’s analysis warns that bots may be a strategy to value the industry further. The report listed several Web 3.0 projects with their respective bot percentage, showing that some of them have more than 80% of bots – such as the AnRKey X game on the Polygon network, whose ratio of bots to owners reached 84%.
Fighting fraud
Polkastarter Gaming’s game developer Omar Ghanem was not surprised by the data: “Almost 2 million wallets interacted with game dApps – which is far from a good indication of real active players”, he said. After all, he said, a gamer can set up multiple wallets and play on various accounts.
According to Kvirkvelia, before web 3.0, people bought and sold game accounts containing rare items, tokens, or ratings with good performance. Therefore, investigating the origin of web 2.0 bots is a complex procedure since data is diverted via VPNs to mask the identity of users.
In any case, the expert points out that the ability to track, analyze, and visualize blockchain data to reveal a hidden picture of a dApps user base is a powerful tool to combat fraud and manipulation
