Update (Oct. 22 at 10:31 UTC): This article has been updated to include comments from Sébastien Borget and Ben James on AI-driven game development.

Artificial intelligence could trigger a wave of short-lived crypto “meme games,” drawing the same speculative traders who helped drive memecoins to record highs in late 2024, according to Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick.

Speculative crypto games such as Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, in which players compete for financial rewards, once took months to develop. Warwick said AI tools have reduced the time and cost of creating similar games to just a few days and about $1,000.

He predicted that as many as 100,000 such games could launch within a year. Many, he said, would be designed to last only a few days — long enough for their creators to make a profit.

“Like you have serial deployers of memes, you’ll get serial deployers of games,” Warwick told Cointelegraph.

Whether such a flood would benefit crypto gaming and the broader industry is less clear. Lower development costs could make niche games viable and renew attention across the sector. However, a wave of disposable crypto games could also leave many speculators “holding the bag.”

“There will be ridiculous gains, and people will get absolutely f****ing rinsed,” Warwick wrote on X on Monday. His post is available here.

A memecoin-style boom — and bust?

In 2024, Pump.fun — a Solana-based launchpad — and similar platforms helped fuel a memecoin surge by making tokens easy to create. The sector’s combined market capitalization reached $150.6 billion in December 2024 before falling nearly 69% to $47.2 billion by November 2025, according to CoinGecko.

The boom divided industry figures. Supporters highlighted memecoins’ appeal to traders, while critics argued that they diverted capital from useful projects and damaged the reputation of crypto.

Warwick said he expected 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 benefit the crypto gaming ecosystem, Warwick said: “probably not.”

“Like in the long run, I don’t think so. The sustainable model that Illuvium has been building towards for years, where really good quality games with ownership underneath, that I think is still the dream of where crypto gaming should be building towards.”

Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands and The Sandbox, expressed a similar view.

“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.

Sébastien Borget, president of the Blockchain Game Alliance and co-founder of The Sandbox, said he viewed the speculative wave as part of a broader expansion in game creation.

“We’re witnessing a true Cambrian explosion of games and creativity, where anyone can turn even their wildest ideas into playable experiences without worrying about the complexities of 2D/3D asset creation, level design, music, or sound effects,” Borget told Cointelegraph.

“But as the cost of experimenting and bringing ideas to life approaches zero, and the abundance of content explodes, the real challenge shifts from creation to discovery, distribution, and reaching an audience.”

More games, but where are the players?

That question about audience was for Corey Wilton, co-founder and CEO of Mirai Labs. He questioned whether an AI-driven increase in supply could overcome 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 applications shows $232.2 million in total value locked across 2,356 apps. A basket of the top 50 gaming tokens had a combined market capitalization of $3.8 billion at the time of writing, according to DappRadar. Those figures describe the market conditions into which Warwick’s projected wave of supply would land.

“I think the lack of demand and liquidity in so-called altcoins is definitely an issue, but I think, at the same time, there is also a lack of choice out there of really enjoyable, fun games that captivate people’s imaginations,” Yung said.

“The reality is the number of game titles that use crypto is very small, and so there’s not a lot of choice for consumers. That makes it difficult to actually judge whether crypto is the issue or it’s just that there aren’t enough good games.”

Recent crypto games indicate that interest in the sector remains despite recent 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 by selling digital land plots as nonfungible tokens. The game is scheduled to launch at the end of the month. Launches like it — and the volume of AI-built titles over the coming year, the one-year window in which Warwick said as many as 100,000 games could launch — should begin to show whether low-cost creation expands crypto gaming’s audience or only its supply.

AI game development reaches crypto

Data indicates that AI has already entered crypto game development. In the Blockchain Game Alliance’s 2025 survey of 506 industry professionals, 32.8% said their company had implemented or experimented with AI for game design and content creation. The survey is available in the BGA 2025 State of the Industry Report.

Yung compared the arrival of AI development tools with the early days of mobile gaming, when lower development 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.”

“What happened was we just got more games of all kinds of quality, and customers had a choice of playing what they liked,” he said.

Ben James, CEO of Atlas Design and 404.xyz, said lower barriers to entry would make originality more important.

“AI will make it easier to launch games, and those that lack creativity, innovation or passion will converge on the average: a sameness we call ‘slop’. At the same time, games that are unique in their aesthetics, gameplay or even business models will stand out.”