Why the games industry needs less scolding and a more positive outlook

• Soccerverse’s Jon Jordan shares his insight ahead of the UK’s biggest games industry conference, Pocket Gamer Connects London, on January 19th to 20th.
• He argues the industry needs less moaning and rejection of disruptive tech like AI and blockchain.

As the games industry anticipates another business year to kick off at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2026 on January 19th to 20th, we spoke with some of the event speakers about current sentiments, uncertainties and future opportunities in games.

One of them, Soccerverse head of crypto business development Jon Jordan (also the editor-at-large at our very own BlockchainGamer.biz), told us that despite prolonged post-covid market challenges, games are playing an increasing role to people, with the strongest potential being in non-traditional platforms and the growing adoption of AI and crypto.

PocketGamer: Tell us briefly about your company and what you’re working on

Jon Jordan: Soccerverse is a fully onchain football management and economic simulation that runs on the Polygon blockchain.

It features over 5,000 clubs and over 160,000 players, each of which is an active entity in terms of its league position and dynamic football stats respectively, and market value including salary and earned bonuses. 

As well as the management part of the game, users can also buy and sell influence in all clubs and players, earning a pro rata share of their incomes. Users can choose to reinvest this into the game, for example, by injecting cash into their clubs so they can buy better players, or cashing out. 

Having experienced some challenging years, do you think we're now seeing some light at the end of the tunnel for the games industry?

After a very strong decade of global growth, the post-covid period has seen the games sector experiencing a number of coincidental challenges - technical, structural, financial, cultural and even philosophical.

On that basis, it's no surprise there's been a prolonged period of uncertainty, which I think still has some way to go until it's been fully processed, and people get a handle on how to approach the next decade. 

In addition, on a personal level, I don't think the toxic rejection of disruptive technologies such as blockchain and generative AI by increasingly conservative elements of the gaming community has helped matters either.

Looking ahead, what is the biggest challenge and opportunity in games?

The opportunity is clearly the long-term trend that gaming in all its many, various forms is attracting an increasingly large share of people's time and money. That's not going to change, but there isn't much growth available from traditional gaming sectors such as PC and console in tier-1 countries. Even traditional mobile is very saturated in terms of the supply of content and the available time/money it can attract. 

That's why we're seeing growth in what recently would have been considered non-traditional gaming platforms, notably Roblox, which in the past year has regularly broken records in terms of concurrent user numbers for highly viral experiences such as Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot. 

The use of generative AI will accelerate this approach, with a corresponding decline of traditional content fidelity. However, such "slop" will be increasingly popular and lucrative.

I think we will also see a slow adoption of crypto stablecoins in gaming. Partly this will be enabled by the unbundling of Apple and Google's payment rails, combined with the adoption of stablecoins by the likes of PayPal, Stripe and Klarna, which will enable entirely new monetisation models, especially important for the billions of people without banking access. 

The biggest challenge will be overcoming the current lack of imagination to use these new creative tools to their maximum. 

What’s one change you would like to see in the industry in 2026?

Less moaning and scolding, and more positivity about the future.

What are some key takeaways you would like to highlight to the audience at PGC London?

Reports of the death of blockchain gaming have been greatly exaggerated. The cockroaches are still building and when I say cockroaches, I mean some companies you have heard of including CCP Games, Nexon, Wemade and Ubisoft, as well as some you won't have, like Soccerverse, Pixels and Angry Dynomites.