Solitaire, Counter-Strike, Snake: How casual gaming could be a ‘huge’ Bitcoin on-ramp

cointelegraph.com:

You can now play Solitaire, Snake and even Counter-Strike to earn Satoshis, tiny fractions of Bitcoin (BTC). Cointelegraph spoke to executives at Thndr Games, a play-to-earn (P2E) company built around Bitcoin and Zebedee, a gaming platform that will “Transform gaming with the power of Bitcoin.”

Thanks to the Lightning Network (LN), a layer-2 payment solution built on top of Bitcoin, instant microtransactions of Sats can pay out to gamers across the globe quickly. “This genuinely fixes a need in gaming,” Ben Cousens, chief strategy officer at Zebedee, told Cointelegraph.

Zebedee offers Bitcoin and LN support for popular games such as Counter-Strike: Go. They promote casual gaming and the creation of inviting environments that could “Bring people into Bitcoin in a way that surprises them,” Cousens explained.

For THNDR, which released a Solitaire-style mobile game on Monday, the rollout of popular, casual gaming types is also about onboarding people into Bitcoin. They actively target gamers in emerging markets as well as female audiences.

Desiree Dickerson, CEO & co-founder of Thndr Games, shared some statistics with Cointelegraph during a call: “Sixty percent of all women worldwide play games, and 60% of these women play mobile games every day.”

On top of that, the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry; “2.6 billion people worldwide play games,” and within that segment, mobile gaming is the most popular. “It makes up 60% of the entire gaming market, and it’s only increasing,” Dickerson explained.

The release of Club Bitcoin: Solitaire specifically taps into the growing female audience segment:

Around 60% of Thndr Game's users are located in the global south, a popular touchpoint for Bitcoiner companies. Emerging