Mobile games will probably onboard more mainstream crypto users than DeFi will

Think about it for a moment.

DeFi has been the buzzword and market mover for this past bull run and surge of speculative hype. It set the markets ablaze from both retail and institutional investors, but hasn't really driven adoption or uptake by the average person. Is the average person day trading, knee deep in liquidity farming and APY chasing, or spending mindless numbers of hours using financial apps and keeping up with financial news?

Or is the average person more likely to have downloaded some mindless mobile game that they can waste a few hours here and there when they have nothing better to do and relieve a bit of stress from their busy (or not so busy) day?

The mobile games industry is absolutely huge. Not just in terms of revenues, but even moreso in terms of reach. Almost every single person that has used a smartphone (about 6.6 billion people, or 83% of the world's population) has probably downloaded and played at least one mobile game before.

Now if mobile games developers start to incorporate cryptocurrency and NFT marketplaces and incentives into their games, there will be an explosion in crypto adoption among the mainstream. It has already begun, as a perusal of any app store will show a smattering of crypto related games starting to launch. All it takes is that one "Angry Birds" or "Candy Crush" or "Clash of Clans" crypto enabled game to take off, and the entire ecosystem will be flooded with them. And in turn, billions of people will then have their first taste of crypto.

I'm not going to make any judgements on whether this will be a "good" or "bad" development for gaming, or for society at large. All I'm saying is that I think this is going to be a big vector for mainstream adoption of crypto.

&

Edit: A lot of people are bringing up the argument that large, profitable game companies have no incentive to incorporate crypto in their games if they are already making huge profits. This is true, but often times it's not large established game companies that rise to the top of the mobile gaming market charts. Smaller and indie game developers and companies are much more prone to test the waters and look for ways to build a new niche audience in a very crowded field. For example, in the early days of mobile game development, it wasn't risk-averse established companies like EA that built games that exploded and went viral, it was small indie devs and companies willing to try new things that created stuff like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, which then later exploded in popularity once casuals got hooked.

Also, not all large game companies are so conservative and risk averse, and forward-thinking ones are probably allocating a part of their vast resources towards R&D and testing the crypto/decentralized waters precisely because there is a possibility it becomes a new and very lucrative model in the future.