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

Gaming companies Zebedee and Thndr are taking advantage of the Lighting Network, atop Bitcoin, to entertain and onboard gamers into Bitcoin.

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

Using the Lightning Network (LN), a Bitcoin-based layer 2 payment solution, Sats' instant microtransactions can quickly be paid out to players around the world. “It really fills a need in the game,” 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 creating inviting environments that could "bring people to Bitcoin in a way that will amaze them" , explained Cousens.

For THNDR, which launched a Solitaire-style mobile game on Monday, rolling out popular and casual game types is also about bringing people into Bitcoin. They actively target emerging market players as well as female audiences.

Sound familiar? In-game footage from CS:Go. Source: Zebedee

Desiree Dickerson, CEO and co-founder of Thndr Games, shared some stats 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 game industry is bigger than the movie industry: about "2.6 billion people worldwide play games", and in this segment, mobile gaming is the most popular. "It's 60% of the entire gaming market, and it's only growing," Dickerson explained.

The release of Club Bitcoin: Solitaire is specifically aimed at the growing segment of the female audience...