Move over memecoins: Crypto ‘meme games’ coming, bagholders and all

“Plenty will be ponzis. Plenty will get exploited. Plenty will insta die. There will be ridiculous gains, and people will get absolutely f***ing rinsed,” says Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick. AI could unleash a flood of short-lived crypto “meme games,” attracting the same speculative traders who helped push memecoins to record highs in late 2024, according to Illuvium co-founder Kieran Warwick. Speculative crypto games such as Wolf Game and Fishing Frenzy, where players compete for financial rewards, once took months to develop. But Warwick says AI tools have reduced the time and cost of creating similar games to just days and around $1,000. He predicts as many as 100,000 such games could launch within a year, with many designed to survive for only a few days — long enough for their creators to turn a profit. “Like you have serial deployers of memes, you’ll get serial deployers of games,” Warwick told Cointelegraph. But whether that flood would benefit crypto gaming and the broader industry is less clear. Cheaper development could make niche games viable and revive attention across the sector, but a wave of disposable crypto games could leave a lot of speculators “holding the bag.” “There will be ridiculous gains, and people will get absolutely f****ing rinsed,” Warwick >wrote on X on Monday. In 2024, Pump.fun and similar launchpads helped fuel a surge in memecoins 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, with supporters championing memecoins’ appeal to traders while critics argued they diverted capital from useful projects and damaged crypto’s reputation. Warwick said he expects a similar speculative wave to touch 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 will ultimately be good for the crypto gaming ecosystem, Warwick said: “probably not.” Warwick said Illuvium’s flagship Overworld game has been in development for more than six years, with a revamped full release targeted for the first quarter of 2027. Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung took 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