BlockchainGamerBiz
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Blockchain gaming weekly roundup: 5th December

By Jenny Jordan on April 11, 2025

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December 5th

Does blockchain win with a bang or a whimper?

If the quiet adoption of stablecoins is anything to go by, you’ll have to listen carefully in the build up, but the final victory march will be deafening. That’s the feeling from the news that Sony is preparing to launch its own USD-backed stablecoin, which is expected to be used by the likes of PlayStation Network, Crunchyroll and Sony Music.

On the gaming front, the big news this week was on Ronin where Fableborne Season 4 is live until 5th January, and where Craft World launched its collab with Fishing Frenzy. You can also play EVE Frontier for free until 9th December.

Looking forward to 2026, cross-platform action-RPG Myths will be going live with its NFT trading on the Mythical Market; the first third party game to gain access to the platform.

Finally, UK studio Footium raised $600,000 from investors including Dimitar Berbatov to continue to build up and scale its Arbitrum-based football management game.

Other news:

November 28th

As we’re approaching the end of 2025, it’s obvious the web3 games market has changed – not because it wanted to but because it had to. Investment has dried up, with fewer and smaller rounds announced.

But projects are still getting funded. South Korean developer Ndus Interactive announced this week it’s raised $1.6 million for pop extraction shooter Xociety, bringing total funding to more than $8 million. Xociety is launching on Epic Games Store for PCs, as well as on the SuiPlay0X1 handheld, on Saturday, November 29th.

Tighter budgets have forced multiple studios to close or pivot over the past two years. One of the latter is South Korea-based Delabs Games which initially worked on a range of web3 PC games. Moving to web3 mobile midcore games built for messaging apps such as Telegram and Line in 2024, it’s recently pivoted further towards genAI. For this endeavor it’s brought in the hand of Planetarium CEO JC Kim, who when speaking to Jon Jordan about his wider AI vision said he thinks genAI can reduce game development costs by up to 90%. Good news for demanding game budgets. 

In terms of Planetarium’s AI game-creation platform Verse8, it’s now live in beta letting users remix or “spin” existing projects to create their own games.

MapleStory Universe’s developer Nexpace (also South Korean) – Nexon’s web3 division – announced this week it’s planning to burn $1.7 million worth of NXPC tokens. Part of a regular programme which will burn tokens quarterly, the aim is to reduce the circulating token supply by around 20%. 

In the first burn which took place on Thursday, November 27th, 3.8 million NXPC tokens were burnt – 1.7% of the circulating supply.

Other news

November 21st

As web3 games and services continue to recoup, streamline, or even shut down, the ones that last become fewer, and inevitably better. 

As CCP Games (EVE Frontier) CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson summarised it in this week’s Mavens feature, “Many of the games I have seen in the space tend to be very focused on the extrinsic, often called financial aspects, which tends to leave them with underdeveloped and reductive intrinsic motivations to interact with the game or world.”

“By focusing more on the creation of i) world, ii) the emergent economy that arises from players needing to coordinate their efforts for world domination, the whole stack needs to be built carefully and masterfully from the ground up. Only once all that has been achieved, financialization might make sense as the top layer.”

Being an established developer and raising a significant amount of funding initially certainly helps in times of drought, giving studios leeway to find product market fit and figure out more sustainable models.

Nexon’s web3 affiliate Nexpace is such an example. Following the launch of its MapleStory N MMORPG in May, it’s now announced a $50 million strong ecosystem fund. Hoping to grow both MapleStory N and its broader MapleStory Universe ecosystem, it marks a significant expansion beyond gaming, including areas like digital finance and AI. 

Fellow South Korean game company Wemade has seen equally strong tailwinds with its blockchain-enabled MMORPG Legend of Ymir. Selling out the first ten of its Partner Server slots letting users run their own game servers – to a price range of $20,000 to $30,000 – Wemade will now offer more flexible options in the shape of Mini, Lite and Origin, which will differ in server size, operational style and price.

Less-financially-backed web3 game developer Hytopia shows visions and ambitions can become reality even without hundreds of millions. This week Jon Jordan spoke with co-founder Maxwell Holmes about how the “Roblox-with-blockchain UGC platform” puts fun first, and how it’s looking to build momentum following the launch of its HYBUX token.

More news

November 14th

One of the ways in which the blockchain game sector is maturing is that some companies are much more actively talking about banning accounts, rather than how many accounts they have.

Leading that charge is Nexon’s web3 arm Nexpace which announced that it’s banned over 640,000 accounts in MapleStory N and the wider MapleStory Universe ecosystem for activities ranging from botting and running in-game macros to buying other people’s already KYC’ed accounts.

To put this into some sort of comparison, the company announced 1.75 million lifetime accounts for the project in October.

The point of such announcements is to demonstrate how seriously Nexpace takes maintaining a level playing field in its MMORPG for all human players. To some extent, then, the large the number of banned accounts, the better.

Another company thinking about player numbers is Sky Mavis, which has tweaked the AXS rewards system for Axie Infinity, making it more complex and harder to extract value. No surprise that the initial result was a 45% drop in DAUWs, although it has recovered somewhat since.

But like Nexpace, the move is part of a growing realization that raw numbers are vanity items for businesses that in the long term need to be generating profits.

More news:

November 7th

Crypto sentiment may be on the way down but blockchain gaming is still striving towards the future, with the big news this week that billion-dollar consumer web3 outfit Animoca Brands has taken the first steps towards a possible Nasdaq listing.

The bad news is that its reverse merger with existing company Currenc is going to take another 9-12 months to clear all the regulations required to complete such a deal. Still, at least that will give us plenty to talk about in 2026.

More bad news came from the announcement that cosy RPG Moonfrost is going pure web2 as it refocuses on a paid Steam launch in 2026. However, the project hasn’t totally lost its web3 confidence with CEO Ric Moore also announcing degen risk-to-earn platform Frost Arcade, which will offer deterministic mini-games with casino-style onchain rewards.

Things are more positive at Immutable, which has seen its IMX token become the first big gaming token to be fully unlocked, meaning there will be no new token inflation. Whether that has any impact on price in the short-term seems unlikely though.

Immutable’s other big news was its deal with Gamedia, which will see its arena shooter Spider Tanks rebooted on Immutable, entering early access for PC and mobile from 8th December.

More news

October 31st

While crypto sceptics immerse themselves in headlines of Uptober turning into Downtober, it’s been noticeable that web3 gaming is playing a different game, mostly independent of broader crypto volatility. That can be both a flaw and a feature.

Web3 games are shifting focus and character due to a lot of (failed) experimentation around product-market-fit. We see a strong differentiation between games not focusing on being a source of money generating at all, and on the other hand fully degen games, which focuses their potential for big earning, with the risk element that you might also lose your money. 

Strong examples of the former include EVE Frontier, but you could also add Soccerverse, Craft World and Wemade’s Legend of Ymir, which launched globally this week. Essentially these are games with blockchain elements that have more than just financial goals.

The other degen category are games built on a gambling-like model, with titles like LOL Land, Gigaverse and Cambria being prime examples. This week Cambria announced a $2 million funding round led by Bitkraft and Sky Mavis, which follows a successful land NFT sale hitting $1.3 million in volume. Meanwhile, YGG’s Abstract-based LOL Land has now generated $6.5 million in revenue during its five months since launch, with the pace increasing as the LOL token launch approaches.

Other news hitting the radar this week included Yuga Labs launching the first official version of its open-world always-on Otherside metaverse, with the browser experience going live on 12th November. Initially it’s releasing Koda Nexus, a social hub and the central experience for Otherside, with more games and experiences further down the line.

With this week’s launch of Chapter 3, Pixels has returned to its roots “with rapid updates, experimentation, and fast iteration”, according to CEO Luke Barwikowski. Something as unique as a game still aspiring to solve the play-to-earn dilemma by hitting a sustainable return-on-reward spend ratio, Pixels is a rare example neither suited in the degen or deeper utility focused category, it seems a rare example of a game finding a balance between both. 

Tune in to the full conversation for some more alpha about Pixels, and return in a week for an interview with Barwikowski.

Other news

October 24th

Blink and you missed it but this week was London Blockchain Week and so Jon dutifully made his way down to the big smoke to moderate a panel at Zebu Live 2025.

Entitled What Is Actually Working For Web3 Games?, the discussion covered themes oft also discussed in our weekly roundup in recent weeks, notably the bifurcation of blockchain games into:

  • Casual Degen experiences such as YGG’s LOL Land and GOAT Gaming’s GrabGifts.
  • Onchain composability games such as EVE Frontier, MapleStory Universe, Craft World, Gigaverse etc.

The vast bulk of free-to-play NFT+token blockchain games have disappeared. The economic model just didn’t work.

This is something also highlighted in our monthly Mavens’ opinion piece covering the key trends in blockchain gaming in 2025. Of course, YGG’s Gabby Dizon and EVE Frontier’s Hilmar Veigar Petursson argued their respective corners.

Also this week, PC 2v2 MOBA deck builder Wildcard went into early access on Steam. It’s a pure web2 game but with a fully featured web3 esports ecosystem via its Thousands platform.

Jon is also enjoying playing RavenQuest companion game RavenIdle, itself another example of how to rework a blockchain game into a more accessible web2 experience to improve onboarding.

Other news:

October 17th

What blockchain you built on used to be a big deal, and maybe in some situations it still is. 

For example, last week CCP Games announced that its in-dev MMOG EVE Frontier was moving from its EVM testnet to Sui because Sui’s object-oriented structure was better aligned to its composability goals.

Similarly, Sorare has just migrated all its NFTs from EVM-based StarkEx blockchain to Solana. Maybe that had something to do with the technical aspects of Solana’s block times and gas fees. Probably, it had a lot more to do with Solana’s reputation as a hotbed of degen asset traders.

As for MapleStory Universe, at the moment it’s highlighting how its new Chainlink integration will allow future builders to plug any supported L1 blockchain into its Avalanche-based Henesys blockchain.

In this way, Henesys will remain the ecosystem’s core chain but assets – and experiences – could seamlessly operate on other blockchains without any security issues.  

In other news, it’s expected that Mythical Games will announce its Series D funding round next week. The news has been pre-announced by tiny US DAT outfit Eightco, which is one of the company’s new investors. It seems that Eightco is trying to boost its stock price by press releasing the news ahead of Mythical’s own announcement. 

Eightco only got into the picture because it’s raised $270 million to buy Worldcoin’s WLD token. Worldcoin is also investing into Mythical, something further supported as its Mythos platform will be integrating Worldcoin’s proof of humanity tech. 

Other news

October 3rd

The big discussion point in this week’s podcast was the announcement of SANDchain. Building on the liquidity of the SAND token, this plans to be a payment/rewards blockchain for creators and their communities; something like an onchain Patreon. 

The interesting question is how connected SANDchain will be – or should be – to The Sandbox? Clearly it’s designed to be connected but also separate from The Sandbox, trying to attract YouTube, Twitch and TikTok creators, perhaps even developers of games for Roblox and mobile app stores. 

But will these creators be interested in sharing their communities and launching memecoins?

Looking at some data-based news, Pudgy Party has hit one million downloads via app stores, driving the Mythos blockchain to an onchain all-time-high in terms of onchain activity during 2025. However, the MYTH token remains near its all-time-low. 

In funding news, India-based web3 gaming rewards platform KGeN raised $13.5 million, taking its total funding to $43.5 million. Ahead of its token launch, it claims 66 million monthly users. 

Also discussed is the beta launch of South Krean outfit Overtake’s web2/3 game item marketplace on the Sui blockchain. This is interesting as the team has been operating web2 game marketplaces in Korea for a decade and are now looking to juice and streamline the experience with blockchain payment rails and the TAKE token. 

Jon also continues his dialogue about what’s happening with Pirate Nation and why Proof of Play was right to shut down the main game and its blockchains, which were losing $150,000 a month. Indeed, the new arcade mode of Pirate Nation’s battle system has already generated $500,000 in two months on Abstract. 

Other news

September 26th

The good news this week was there’s a lot of talk about new games and exciting roadmaps.

More generally, the discussion in the podcast revolved around fundamental issues such as how blockchain games can divorce the inherently real-world value of their in-game assets with the speculative nature of their communities.

This was underlined by the ongoing drama around the shutdown of Pirate Nation and some whales’ presumption about how much they should be rewarded for their historic reckless speculation. Perhaps not unrelated, degen KOL and serial pre-token investor Grail said he was leaving game token investing to focus on DeFi projects.

Other news:

September 19th

Whether or not you treat the term “degen” as a badge of honor or a mark of Cain, there’s no disputing the rise of degen crypto gaming over the past 12 months.

In part this is a byproduct of the strength of crypto trends and prices more generally, and in part the failure of traditional blockchain gaming.

But amid the inevitable booms and busts, some degen games are demonstrating they are finding audiences and revenues, especially on the Abstract blockchain, where players also get to earn Abstract XP in hopes of a forthcoming token airdrop.

The two games in the vanguard are RPG Gigaverse and casual degen title LOL Land, which have announced $5.5 million and $2.5 million of lifetime revenue.

Gigaverse is now looking to take its simple dungeon-crawling gameplay and extend it out with an open world experience. Its own development is also backed by third party builders in the Gigaverse Hub; something which is key to its vision of becoming a ‘universe of universes”.

As for LOL Land, its developer YGG Play is expanding its own horizons with the news that it is publishing Delabs Games’ GigaChadBat baseball game on Abstrast. Itwas originally launched in Telegram.

Other news

September 12th

Almost two weeks into Sleepy September, although it might be better described as “transitional” with anticipation for Q4 creeping up.

As web2 PC card collectible MOBA Wildcard is approaching its October launch, it has accumulated 75,000 wishlists on Steam. Playful Studios has also released more details about the game’s wider web3 ecosystem, contained within the Thousands community platform.

Alongside its interactive streaming tech and esports elements embedded with Wildcard assets, a new introduction is the Wildcard Fantasy League. The details are altogether clear, but broadly this will allow KYC’ed users to sponsor certain in-game characters, using the ecosystem’s WC token. If a character is drafted into the game’s season, its sponsor will receive a signing bonus and a cut of that character’s in-game winnings.

Elsewhere, a web3 game defying the slow tide and demonstrating strong momentum is mobile battle royale game Pudgy Party. A joint venture from Pudgy Penguins headco Igloo and Mythical Games, it launched globally on August 29th, less than two weeks ago and has hit 500,000 downloads via app stores. For reference, Mythical’s FIFA Rivals, launched in June 2025, did 1 million downloads in its first seven weeks. 

Initially launched by Yuga Labs in 2023 and acquired by Faraway Games in 2024, the HV-MTL collection has been bought by Adam Weitsman, an entrepreneur who also acquired the Golden Key NFT from Yuga’s Dookey Dash game for $1 million in 2023. Working with web3 dev Gabe8bit, Weitsman is planning to include the collection in Yuga’s forthcoming Otherside metaverse. 

Other news

September 5th

Transitioning from a farming game into a gaming-oriented DeFi staking ecosystem, Pixels has lost the largest number of DAUWs in 2025. Down to 25,000 daily active wallets, the game is approaching its second anniversary on Ronin, a network itself undergoing major changes.

Nothing new under the sun when it comes to the current state of web3 games, in other words. On a more positive note, MapleStory Universe and its MapleStory N continues to see steady growth, despite recently banning 20,000 bot accounts. 

Following a busy launch month in August, Voya Games’ idle resource mobile/browser game Craft World has released its first partner event, in collaboration with fellow Ronin NFT collection Ronke. The event comes with a new range of resources, which are collected and used to level up factories or contribute to three masterpiece items. Rewards are offered in the form of Ronke’s RICE token, Craft World’s Water Dyno NFTs and RON tokens.

Noting the recent momentum of degen games such as LOL Land on Abstract and Cambria and Fishing Frenzy on Ronin, GLHF announced it’s raised $2.3 million to support the expansion of Gigaverse. Running on the Abstract blockchain using Proof of Play’s tech stack, Gigaverse is also selling Gigaverse Eggs NFTs on OpenSea, which will carry over into the Gigaverse open world when it launches.

Following last week’s rumors that The Sandbox might become a token launchpad (among other claims), the news of Moca Network’s $20 million MocaPortfolio rewards campaign is interesting. MocaPortfolio aims to drop ongoing rewards to MOCA stakers and holders of Mocaverse NFTs in the form of tokens from Animoca Brands’ investment and partner companies, starting with Magic Eden’s ME token in Q4.

Now with three mobile games live – NFL Rivals, FIFA Rivals and Pudgy Party, how is Mythical’s Mythos ecosystem faring in terms of onchain activity? As expected, it’s booming. Are we seeing the start of that long desired goal of 100 million wallets?

Other news

August 29th

Not announced in the way either Animoca Brands’ nor its subsidiary The Sandbox would have wished, nonetheless, this week the news broke, preceded by rumors, of a major restructuring plan for The Sandbox.

A seemingly annoyed Yat Siu, the executive chairman of Animoca Brands, set the record straight in his opinion in a Cointelegraph live stream, confirming something while contextualizing other claims.

From now on, The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget will officially be the global ambassador, also working on “a special project related to the SAND token and The Sandbox” which will be announced in a few months.

The other co-founder, Arthur Madrid, has become chairman, while Animoca’s Robby Yung is stepping in as CEO. As such he will bring “The Sandbox to the next stage, building it up to something much stronger than it was before” according to Siu. 

Yung has a big task ahead of him. The mission is to spark new life and confidence into a project that’s lost momentum. This means branding The Sandbox as something different, yet something that takes advantage of its “very liquid SAND token”. Siu’s take that everything is a memecoin, a notion the power of internet virality is affirming day-by-day, is a good start.

Onto a game that’s looking to leverage exactly that flywheel of IP virality, Pudgy Party. Launching globally via app stores today (Friday 29th August) the game is only one part of the wider Pudgy Penguins’ ecosystem. 

With plushies and animations based on the original NFT collection already proving successful, Luca Netz’s and Mythical Games’ joint vision is to drive 100 million downloads with Pudgy Party through web3, KOL collabs, and most recently, a launch partnership with Roblox’s 15 million player-strong Steal a Brainrot. 

Looking to materialise the long term plan to decentralize Axie Infinity from Sky Mavis, the Axie Infinity Constitution has been unveiled. The 5-page proposal defines how the Axie Infinity Decentralized Autonomous Organization (the Axie DAO) is established and who can become Citizens of Axie Infinity, with the ability to vote on proposals from the DAO.

The constitution will be up for vote for current Axie Citizens, those holding at least one AXS token or Axie NFT, starting from Monday 1st September and ending seven days later.

Other news

August 22nd

Another blockchain game is closing down but while Proof of Play’s fully onchain title Pirate Nation will only be around for another month or so, the company lives on with a new focus on profitable operations and its PIRATE token.

The reasons for the shutdown are many but the crux of the matter appears to be that Pirate Nation’s token-incentivized seasons generated so many players that Proof of Play felt it had to launch its own blockchains to handle the traffic. However, once it stopped giving away tokens, traffic dropped significantly, meaning that the costs of running these blockchains – $150,000 a month – become prohibitive. The result was the game and the chains are being shut down.

Perhaps Pirate Nation players will take comfort from Splinterlands’ Crypto Games Recovery Fund, which is giving away $500,000 of in-game assets over the coming seven years to encourage players of defunct blockchain games to onboard to the TCG, which itself is one of the longest running web3 experiences, launching in 2018.

More positive news came from Zillion Whales, which is working hard to reboot its Ronin-based strategy game Wild Forest, which has also now launched on the Epic Games Store. New features and a possible esports tournament are some of the reasons that its WF token is up over 400% in the past months, althought it’s still down 80% from its December 2024 launch price.

Additional news

August 15th

Emerging from stealth in July, MMOG veteran John Smedley and his new studio Distinct Possibility unveiled Reaper Actual. 

Setting the tone as doing things differently, Reaper Actual is built on Tezos-based L2 Etherlink, which is uncommon in web3 games circles. Reaper Actual is a PC-based persistent open-world shooter – “a mix between a first-person shooter and an MMORPG, a completely new kind of game that we hope is going to be the start of a new genre”, as Smedley describes it – hoping to attract both web2 and web3 players. As such it will launch as a web2 game via Steam and Epic Games Store, with a separate web3 version dropping via its own website. Jon recently sat down for a conversation with Smedley unpacking all the details on how this will work practically, the studio’s use of AI, Tezos, funding, and more.

Announcing $20 million in funding in today’s investment climate would usually generate a wave of bullish social media posts and headlines. However, in the case of Neon Machine, which this week unveiled $19.5 million raised for Shrapnel, the reception was a dismal sign of lost momentum. Nothing new, the game has continued to struggle for some time for many reasons, all underpinned by an ongoing legal dispute. In a surprise move, the developer recently announced it’s leaving Avalanche, the network it’s built its own game infrastructure on for over five years, to instead join Gala Games’ GalaChain. That move was preceded by the news that the game will launch on China’s official blockchain, the first overseas web3 game to do so.

While an abundance of blockchain games are shutting down or throwing in the towel, others are testing new waters. It’ll be intriguing to see if new funding from Gala can keep Shrapnel above the surface. 

Finally, two and a half weeks after launching on Ronin, the almost fully onchain game Craft World is dominating transactions on the blockchain, despite only 1,000 daily active players. 

Additional news

August 8th

Impacted by a significantly dried-up market, 2025 has meant numerous web3 games have shut down. Others are pivoting to web2, building infrastructure, AI-driven games, or something else. 

Not stating openly it’s because of funding, but in a surprise move nevertheless, TCG Cross The Ages announced in July it was moving from Immutable to Solana. The migration is now completed and Cross The Ages is looking to roll out a range of new features as it prepares for Season 4.

With its own YGG token close to an all-time low, Yield Guild Games claims its Abstract-based degen game LOL Land generated $176,000 on Sunday 3rd August, and it’s already used some of the profits, spending 135 ETH, to buy back $518,000-worth of YGG, with the token’s price rising a modest 10%.

But while market conditions remain tough and few will prove resilient enough to come out better for it, we’ve looked at three blockchain games that actually work. More importantly, the questions to ask are why they work and what we can learn from these games.

Another developer seemingly making web3 work through intentional integration is Mythical Games and its FIFA Rivals. Recently exceeding 1 million downloads via Google Play and App Store, we checked in with Mythical CEO John Linden about the game, players’ reactions to some of its more surprising features, and what’s next.

Finally, while some of us have spent the week increasing our step count in the Cumbrian fells, others have been busy announcing new deals and partnerships. Notably, Animoca Brands

  • Announced a partnership with AMGI Studios to support the adoption of PC shooter My Pet Hooligan
  • Is applying for a stablecoin issuer license in Hong Kong, together with strategic partner companies
  • Unveiled new vault marketplace Nuva, which aims to connect real-world asset issuers with investors
  • In partnership with Coin Operated Group, it has made another strategic investment into Cool Cats, making Animoca a majority shareholder in Cool Cats Group

Other headlines

1st August

The hard work really starts when your game goes live and that’s what developer Voya Games and players of Craft World are now dealing with. Technical issues meant the launch was delayed by a day and – as ever – some people have been complaining that they thought they were going to get more free money when the DynoCoin token went live on Ronin.

This is despite Voya clearly stating that DynoCoin is a transaction token that only has utility to buy more in-game resources. Indeed, there’s technically an unlimited supply and the price is designed to continually go down.

In that context, the news players will have to buy a $8 Pro Account if they want to move tokens out-of-the-game is actually good for the game’s sustainability as it will limit the extractive power of bots, although also likely impacting the size of the playerbase. But as we’ve seen from games such as Pixels, restricting players selling off your token is the only way to go. Better to be strict from the beginning.

Other news saw Mythical Games announcing that FIFA Rivals has already been downloaded more than 1 million times. Its forthcoming Pudgy Party is out due out in August and some NFTs are already live on the Mythical Market.

Other headlines:

25th July

The only silver lining to the news that Tokyo Games Foundation is shutting down launch game TOKYO BEAST on 24th August, is the controlled way in which the game is being closed down. The foundation has allocated $350,000 in USDC compensation to NFT holders and is also refunding IAPs.

Nevertheless, coming just six weeks after the game launched, it all suggests the rumored $20 million project was operating on an extremely positive forecast of its future success, something that needs to be addressed if the promised additional games in development are going to avoid the same fate.

Better news came from Delabs Games, which ahead of its DELABS token launch next week, revealed it had received additional funding, taking its lifetime total to $17.2 million.

Things were also busy at GOAT Gaming, which launched its Season 4 with new idle clicker Underground Pepe. This will reward players with various prizes including in-platform currency Crown, USDT, Telegram-based NFTs and even some iPads.

And with the launch of Off The Grid on Steam this week, and Reaper Actual’s future plans in mind, our Mavens discussed whether it makes sense to create a web2 version of a web3 game in order to launch on platforms which don’t allow blockchain.

Additional news included:

18th July

There’s always plenty of news happening around AI and AI agents and this week the web3 game companies making a noise were Delabs Games and Planetarium, and Saga and Crono Labs.

Delabs has announced it’s going to be making games using Planetarium’s genAI game-making platform called Verse 8. Indeed, Planetarium’s CEO JC Kim is also joining Delabs as co-CEO. As for Verse 8, it allows you to make multiplayer games that also have their own item economies.

Blockchain company Saga is also leaning into AI and agents, this time with Chrono Labs. Together they are launching the KEX platform, which will allow people and companies to make AI agents that can act onchain, as well as doing the usual chat stuff.

But it’s not just about AI this week. Things are happening right now. Fully onchain football game Soccerverse starts its Season 2 this weekend, while Voya Games’ Craft World is now confirmed to go live on the Ronin blockchain on Tuesday 29th July. This is when players of the Project Voyager campaign will also receive their DynoCoins airdrop.

Two projects that are reconsidering their strategy when it comes to giving away tokens are Sky Mavis, which is working on what it calls Ronin v2 tokenomics, and Yield Guild Games, which is shutting down its Guild Advancement Program when the current event ends. Both projects are looking to give away more rewards to more committed players, and hence fewer rewards to extractive users.

Additional news included:

4th July

Can EverQuest veteran John Smedley get web3 right? If nothing else, it’s good to see ambition.

Smedley’s co-founded startup Distinct Possibility Studios recently unveiled open-world persistent loot shooter Reaper Actual. In development for two years, the game has secured $30.5 million in funding, which was led by Bitkraft and Brevan Howard Digital. 

In terms of “doing web3 right”, the web3 version of Reaper Actual will deploy on Tezos’ EVM L2 Etherlink. As Smedley has said, the focus is the game itself, with web3 features such as the ability to own and trade NFT bases being an optional bonus. The version of the game released via Steam and Epic Games Store will be purely web2, however. Expected to release alpha in the coming weeks.

Three weeks following Mythical Games’ mobile football game FIFA Rivals going live, a significant feature enabling players to combine fragments into complete players has been added. Each completed player is ranked mythical, and consists of five fragments which can either be earned in-game or bought via Mythical Marketplace. Of course, the first ones have already been created and put up for sale, with the cheapest version of Lionel Messi being priced at $11,204.

In case you missed it, we also made a handy guide how to play FIFA Rivals.

Thanks to its LUMI token MegaDrop 1 now being live – although the token isn’t live yet – Ronin-based pixel MMORPG Lumiterra has seen a sharp uptick in dailies. Daily onchain activity spiked at over 300,000 DAUWs this week, accounting for around half of all combined activity on Ronin. This makes Lumiterra a clear leader in terms of most popular blockchain games, with other titles to podium in our July update including Alien Worlds and Axie Infinity.

In conjunction with fully onchain Minecraft-game Chunked version 2 dropping, Jon had a great conversation with Improbable co-founder and MSquared CEO Rob Whitehead about how faster blockchains and more onchain data can supercharge web3 gaming. In particular Whitehead explains how MSquared, which he calls “Amazon Web Services for virtual worlds” is building an underlying technology layer that’s going to allow virtual worlds to connect on a new level.

Lastly, alongside Delabs Games opening pre-regs for Ragnarok Libre, Jenny spoke to CEO Joonmo Kwon about his expectations for the game and how the forthcoming DELABS token launch will boost ecosystem growth.

Additional news from the week

27th June

Does the world need another blockchain? One could justify arguments in both ways. In the case of Moca Chain, an EVM L1 announced by Animoca Brands and Moca Foundation this week, the argument is that Moca Chain will provide chain-agnostic blockspace with the purpose of allowing users to verify their ID credentials without relying on centralized platforms, also maintaining control of the privacy of their data. Of course, it’s no coincidence the news comes ahead of Animoca Brands looking to IPO in the US.

One example of a game that would benefit from Moca Chain, or at least a robust identity and reputation system, is Nexon’s MapleStory N. Continuing to suffer from high bot activity, Nexon is now introducing Credit Levels, a system it hopes will discourage bad actors through barriers like a token requirement and KYC to access the game.

We’re not usually the ones to set a countdown before web2 game launches, but one of the most anticipated games with web3 connections via its Thousands platform, Playful Studios’ CCAG Wildcard, is launching on Steam in October. You bet we’re excited, even if Jon’s not sure he’s going to play it!

US web3 game startup Spekter Games, founded by ex-nWay Taehoon Kim, has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding. Decloaking with Telegram-based web3 roguelite Spekter Agency, the team also has a second game in development.

Following its Jurassic World-themed Alpha Season 5, The Sandbox has unveiled a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, which is set to headline its Alpha Season 6.

20th June

Playful Studios, led by Paul Bettner, announced this week it’s raised $6.5 million from Arbitrum and Paradigm for Thousands and its associated web2 CCAG (collectible card action game) Wildcard. Growing token utility entirely based on community demand rather than hype, developer gains, or early investor prospects, its ecosystem token WC has been allocated 100% to its engaged community.

Voya Games’ Craft World is doing something similar. None of its forthcoming DynoCoins have been allocated to the dev team. The full pot is for the players themselves to be spent in return for other in-game resources. Of course it’s a crypto token and will be live through Ronin’s Katana DEX, but it’s not launching on major centralised exchanges, which immediately reduces the risk of a sinking token killing your game.

Yet one of the brightest examples of a team aspiring to create a more sustainable future for game tokens is Pixels. Initially confined to its own social RPG Pixels, the PIXEL token has now expanded to three more games, with two or three additional titles to be added soon. In conjunction with its expansion, PIXEL is now experiencing a significant turnaround in return-on-rewards, with tokens staked back into the ecosystem growing faster than the amount being rewarded to players. 

Five weeks after going live, Nexon’s PC MMORPG Maplestory N, which did launch its NXPC token via the world’s largest CEX Binance, continues to grow both in terms of user wallets and NFT trading on its Maplestory Universe marketplace. The latter is plateauing somewhat, but this week saw the most expensive NFT so far sell for $18,617.

Notably, since its token launch, NXPC has dropped 72%.

In not too long time, we may know more about Off The Grid’s actual metrics too, as Gunzilla Games has said the Gunz mainnet migration is due in the coming weeks. Despite a claimed number of 16.8 million player wallets having to wait a little longer, an initial bunch of 21,000 OG wallets already migrated have been granted the ability to trade their assets on thirdparty marketplaces such as OpenSea.

Like Maplestory N, Off The Grid’s GUNZ token launched – not exempt from controversy – via Binance earlier in 2025. Its price has dropped 79% since.

Lastly we take a look at the web3 game going hottest across our mobile devices since its launch eight days ago, FIFA Rivals – from first impressions to how it compares to NFL Rivals to its debated NFT features.

13th June

While Malcolm Gladwell’s famous statement “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness” has proven to be more fluid than an exact formula, it’s still the reality that most great achievements take a long time to perfect.

Today we’re shining a light on four such products – web3 games that have been built with careful intention, over many years, but which are now beginning to show their full potential.

First up is Mythical Games’ FIFA Rivals, which is now live through app stores.

This arcade experience also has players building – also levelling and training – a squad of real-world players, some of which can be tradable NFTs. Other in-game NFTs include licensed kits, balls, celebrations and club emblems.

Also going live this week is Project Voyager, which is the play-to-airdrop campaign for Voya Games’ Craft World. For the next four weeks, players collect – and spend – crystals to boost their leaderboard ranking. 

When Craft World goes live on the Ronin blockchain on 5th July, the top 25,000 ranked players will get an allocation of the game’s Dyno Coin.

CCP Games’ EVE Frontier has been live in its closed alpha for a number of months but this week, it wiped the universe and launched a new cycle, also allowing players to start talking about their experiences as it lifted its NDA.

The game will likely be building out for a number of years yet, but it’s great to see how CCP and other creators get creating this fully onchain survival space universe.

Finally, MapleStory N continues to break records, with over 1 million wallets active on its NFT marketplace, which has broken $13 million in lifetime trading volume. The most expensive NFT just sold for $14,000 too.

6th June

While we shouldn’t ignore the struggles of some web3 games – we opened the week talking about Dogami – we shouldn’t give into the temptation of hyping bad news for clicks either.

So to redress the balance, we’ve started a feature putting the spotlight on blockchain game successes. The first story is about Fishing Frenzy and its promising season 1 results.

No doubt, we’ll be highlighting FIFA Rivals’ future performance there too, given that Mythical Games’ mobile game is launching on Thursday 12th June. 

It could generate a great boost for the industry, with tens of millions of downloads possible. Notably, ahead of launch, Mythical has also unveiled a significant partnership with Adidas, and online football community One Football. 

Talking of good web3 games, nominations to the Pocket Gamer Mobile Game Awards 2025 are now live, with categories like ‘Best Use of Blockchain’, ‘Best Use of AI’, and ‘Best Game Innovation’.

CCP Games’ EVE Frontier has also dropped some exciting news with a new trailer going live on Sunday 8th June, in conjunction with the launch of its new era that also sees the lifting of its NDA for players to share their experiences thus far. 

Following its recent $5 million funding round, Voya Games is bringing fully onchain idle resource sim Craft World from Polygon testnet to Ronin mainnet in conjunction with the game launch in summer 2025. With Axie Infinity and Pixels being the only games with any substantial audience on Ronin, this partnership is likely to turn out a great move both for Voya and Sky Mavis.

A month after the launch of its new staking system, Pixels has seen another game, and the first one outside of Ronin, onboard its ecosystem. Due to launch on mobile later in Q2 2025, Sleepagotchi is the fourth game alongside Pixels, Pixel Dungeons and Forgotten Runiverse to join this innovative staking system.

Continuing to show promise, MapleStory Universe’s Henesys blockchain has broken 70,000 DAUWs, while MapleStory N saw an in-game NFT sold for $12,694.

Additional news

30th May

Following a couple of weeks of heady activity, this one was quieter in terms of pure web3 gaming news. That’s not a sign that nothing’s going on, but more of an indication that moves are happening under the surface. After all, blockchain is a technology, and its integrations don’t always make for obvious headline news. 

NFT marketplace OpenSea has dropped its beta label for its OS2 update. Despite competitors, such as Blur and Magic Eden, OpenSea has stood its ground over the years and is now becoming an all-in-all crypto platform enabling token swaps in addition to NFT trades with cross-chain support spanning 19 networks. The company’s recent appointment of its first global gaming ambassador, Kyle ‘Mongraal’ Jackson, is also an encouraging sign of its belief in the future of game NFTs. 

Disney+ has rolled out its new always-on loyalty program. Although it’s not officially saying it’s integrating NFTs, the program now includes access to Dapper Labs’ Disney Pinnacle NFT collectibles. It’s a big deal for Dapper Labs which has been quietly operating Disney Pinnacles on its Flow blockchain for the past 18 months.

Another the-revolution-is-a-slow-train-coming news includes Oncade and its $4 million seed funding announcement. Not a web3 gaming distribution platform per se, Oncade is a newly launched game distribution and marketing platform rolled out in the wake of the unbundling of Apple and Google’s app store walled gardens. 

Enabled by stablecoins, it offers immediate crypto payments, but its stronger selling point is how it hopes to position gaming communities – web2 as well as web3 – as a core element of marketing.

In contrast, fully-fledged web3 community YGG has launched its expanded vision including what it calls “casual degen” game publishing. As for what this means, it will leverage “crypto degen” mechanics in terms of risk and rewards in its casual games, with the first title LOL Land recently rolled out on Abstract.

Nexpace’s Avalanche-based Henesys blockchain has seen onchain activity levels rise steadily following the launch of its MSU marketplace and MMORPG MapleStory N. Hitting 50,000 DAUWs, although this has decreased due to bot prevention measures, it’s surpassed both social RPG Pixels and combined wallet activity on Immutable zkEVM.

Additional news

23rd May

Unfortunately this week has come with more web3 games announcing their final chapter. 

  • First Light Games is discontinuing development of mobile battle royale Blast Royale. Going forward, the game will officially close down on 30th June, but will be open-sourced from 1st June. 
  • Tatsu Works is sunsetting its RPG life sim Tatsumeeko: Lumina Fates, stating that by closing down the game, the team can return to its roots. This means working on its new web2 game Project: Wander.
  • Bright Star Studios announced it’s shutting down Ember Sword with immediate effect as a result of insufficient funding.

Of course, canned web3 games are an inevitable part of the industry. The reason we’re seeing a wave of them closing down now, is because most web3 game funding was raised in 2021 and 2022, so now, or yesterday, is likely to be a time many teams are running out of funding, unless they’re able to raise more.

Keep track of the games officially shutting down or rebooting as web2 experiences in 2025 via our list.

On a brighter note, one studio securing new funding recently is German developer Voya Games, announcing it’s raised $5 million for fully onchain mobile/browser idle resource game Craft World. The round was led by cypto VC 1kx and traditional VC Makers Fund. A strong selling point behind Voya is its CEO Oliver Löffler, a co-founder at mobile idle game developer Kolibri Games, which was acquired by Ubisoft for over $160 million in 2020.

Shoutout to CCP Games and Leah Callon-Butler for the new cap. We love it!

Gunzilla Games’ Off The Grid is expanding beyond Epic Games Store, Xbox series X and PS5, with an expected launch on Steam in June 2025. The Avalanche-based extraction shooter will launch with full cross-play support across all platforms, allowing players to squad up and compete regardless of hardware. There’s not been any mention of its web3 features, but granted Steam still doesn’t allow any such integration, we’d assume it will be a pure web2 version of the game.

Nexon’s MapleStory Universe developer Nexpace attended Avalanche’s London Summit this week, where CBO Dominic Jang shared the team’s wider vision for recently launched MapleStory N and the MSU ecosystem. For while PC MMORPG MapleStory N has hit $1.6 million in NFT trading during its first week – both in-game items and characters – the game itself is not Nexpace’s main focus. Instead, Jang said the measure of success will be the day another ecosystem app is bigger than MapleStory N.

Additional news

16th May

Following on from last week’s main news, Nexon’s PC MMORPG MapleStory N has now launched. Despite overwhelmed servers and some maintenance issues, it seems to have gone fairly smoothly.

While the MapleStory Universe scrolls were still minting last week, it eventually ended in over 1.7 million free NFTs minted in total. As a result, the number of new users on Avalanche shot off, seeing the network hit 6 million wallets, and over 3 million monthly active users.

Alongside game launch, the NXPC token launched via a series of central exchanges too. Since TGE, its price has dropped somewhat from $2.96 to $2.65.

Continuing its gaming roll, Avalanche also saw the addition of Paradise Chain, the blockchain supporting Paradise Tycoon, Paradise Legends, and other future games from Finnish developer Empires Not Vampires.

Another significant developer moving its games to Avalanche is Pixelmon with its mobile RPG Warden’s Ascent being the first to launch.

Well timed then, Avalanche is hosting its Avalanche Summit in London on 20-22 May 2025, where you can catch our editor-at-large Jon Jordan.

Crazy Defense Heroes enables IAPs using TOWER tokens

One of the first web3 games to leverage the scrapped Apple 30% tax is Animoca Brands’ mobile tower defense game Crazy Defense Heroes, which this week announced it’s rolled out payment options including the use of TOWER tokens. These can now be used to buy exclusive IAPs via an app link-out to the game’s webstore. With 540 partner projects in its portfolio and a leading star to many web3 apps and companies, Animoca showing it can be done and work could prove hugely significant to the future of mobile web3 gaming.

Animoca eyeing IPO

So it’s not without substance that Animoca Brands has also unveiled plans to IPO in the US. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense considering the growth Animoca has seen in recent years, the power house it’s become, and the softening of US crypto regulations.

GotW: Blocklords – Battleborne

A long time coming, Blocklords has released its most significant game update yet with the addition of battle mode. This adds strategic depth to the game by letting players set up battle units and go head to head in real-time battles against NPCs. All the important resources grinded throughout a year and a half of farming is finally coming into significant play as these restore and power up the troops.

If there was any doubt, Blocklords is still one of the most ambitious web3 game out there by miles, and it’s still only in open beta. Get grinding – and battling – folks.

All about Wildcard

Perhaps the most ambitious game within the realms of web3, however, is Wildcard from Playful Studios, in development for seven years. Although technically a web2 game, this card collectible action (CCAG) MOBA has the exciting element of Thousands, its web3 streaming platform, which came about due to the developer not finding Twitch sufficient to meet its needs.

Discover all about the web2/web3 Wildcard ecosystem in our recent interview with Playful CEO Paul Bettner and game designer Brad Weir.

Additional news

9th May

Sometimes the news isn’t what’s happening but what’s going to happen, and that’s been the case this week as we prepare for the global launch of Nexon’s PC MMORPG MapleStory N on 15th May.

Technically, you can actually pre-install the 22 GB game ahead of time but the headlines have been made by the free mint of the MSU Scroll NFT via OpenSea. Hitting 300,000 mints within 12 hours, the total is now over 800,000. You have until 12th May to get yours!

Another event happening next week is the collaboration between Sui shooter Xociety and Adidas, which will see 2,500 skin packs being minted with prices ranging from $90 to $130. Each pack will contain various selections of Adidas-branded skins plus gain its holder an allocation of the XO token whenever it goes live. 

AI agents are always in the news and this week GOAT Gaming launched the first version of its AlphaGOAT agents in the shape of Amy, who you can chat to – obvs – as well as attempt to bet in a game on Waifu Clash on Telegram. No doubt more functionality will be added in due course. 

Move-to-earn project Sweat also added an agent called Mia, but its purpose was to help users deal with the previously Near-only app going multichain. Presumably it will also encourage us to do more exercise too at some point. 

Other news included: 

2nd May

Enthusiasm levels are on a high this week as some of the most prominent and anticipated web3 games topped our headlines:

Pixels’ PIXEL staking system has gone live. This highlights Pixels’ bigger play-to-earn vision as it expands into a multi-game ecosystem. As part of this, Pixels will also be the first major game to integrate Apptokens. Ahead of the announcement, editor-at-large Jon Jordan caught up with CEO Luke Barwikowski to get all the alpha.

  • Nexon’s first release within its MapleStory Universe ecosystem, PC MMORPG MapleStory N, will launch on 15th May. One of the most anticipated web3 games over the last two years, MapleStory N is developed by Nexon’s web3 arm Nexpace. It will launch on Avalanche-based L1 Henesys alongside the NXPC token, player-to-player marketplace, and UGC features. 
  • Paul Bettner has unveiled some stats following the initial live streams of Playful Studios’ MOBA Character Collection Action Game Wildcard. More than the impressive stats in themselves, it’s also a strong indication of a very well made web2 game with intentional integration of web3 rewards made possible through its spectator platform Thousands. For those interested in learning more (and you should be) we’ve got an in-depth interview with Bettner going live next week. 

Clickbait-y rumours had it that Pokemon Home was launching NFTs. Although the news wasn’t quite that exciting, Nintendo does appear to be using web3 gaming infrastructure Parasol Technologies in the mobile version of its Pokémon Home app. At least the company includes Parasol in the English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian versions of its updated Privacy Terms.

Hot take of the week: Apptokens can only be a good thing, and perhaps the only thing, saving the currently sinking ship that is web3 game tokens.

Additional news

25th April

After two years of development, Ubisoft and Immutable have unveiled the result of their collaboration. Launching towards the end of 2025, the game is a strategy TCG called Might & Magic Fates, which is based on the Might & Magic universe. 

In terms of web3 features, players will be able to trade their cards, however this is fully optional and adds no competitive advantages.

No doubt, it will be well made, but will the Might & Magic IP in combination with the TCG genre provide a breakthrough for web3 adoption? Nonetheless, it could prove to become the best web3 TCG yet.

In a turn of events, PLAY token entity Ready Maker (Gibraltar) has overturned Ready Games US’ legal case which saw the Supreme Court of Gibraltar freezing 450 million tokens in February 2025. 

Overturning the injunction, the judge pointed out that Ready US had been non-compliant since March 2023 and dissolved as a company in March 2024. It also noted that the initial freezing order had resulted in a sharp fall in the PLAY token price. A further hearing on 25th April 2025 will determine the indemnity costs payable to PLAY. Stay tuned, as they say. 

Further to our recent discussions about Apptokens, Pixels has announced it will be the first major game to integrate Limit Break’s protocol. As part of major changes coming to Pixels, CEO Luke Barwikowski announced the creation of the vPIXEL token, which will be a token that can only be spent or staked. Backed 1:1 against PIXEL, players will however be able to withdraw vPIXEL without any fees, using it in partnered games such as Forgotten Runiverse.

With a previous statement that its FIFA-licensed mobile football game FIFA Rivals would launch “in summer 2025”, it’s now confirmed that the game is aiming for a 14th June launch, alongside FIFA kicking off its Club World Cup. Prior to its global launch, the game is set for pre-release in specific regions in May.

With Jurassic World being the highlighted experience for its current Alpha Season 5, The Sandbox keeps rolling out new experiences regularly, one particularly enjoyable based around The British Museum.

In other major The Sandbox news this week, the platform has signed a multi-year deal with Bruce Lee Enterprises. Initially, there will be a Bruce Lee hub making its way into The Sandbox, with the later addition of a solo experience called Tao of the Dragon.

On 3rd-4th June, Pocket Gamer Connects is making its debut in Spain’s main tech hub and economic centre Barcelona. Do you want to be a speaker?

Additional news

18th April

It may be the Easter holidays but blockchain gaming news waits for no-thing, especially in a week in which Immutable’s year-long Perpetual Rewards – previously called The Main Quest – finally dropped its first rewards.

In total, around $230,000 of IMX tokens were given away, with the top wallet getting $8,467-worth of IMX. That stated, the prize pool for the coming week is down to around $90,000. Over time, other assets including game NFTs will also be added into the mix.

Of course, the point of the exercise is to encourage people to play as many Immutable games as possible and for as long as possible. Although each reward key costs 500 gems, the more you play the rarer your key, and the rarer the key, the better the rewards.

Other news this week included Shrapnel revealing more details about its Chinese expansion. All players will play within the same game world, but Chinese gamers will have their own separate NFT marketplace, although it’s expected that assets will be transferable between marketplaces.

Another interesting snippet is that console shooter Off The Grid reportedly generated more than $1 million in revenue last month. That’s not much considering it’s raised over $100 million but at least it’s a start. If nothing else, the game is still in early access and running on the Gunz’s testnet.

11th April

Spring has certainly arrived, the world’s in economic turmoil, and all this shall pass. Indeed, some of the changes taking place might prove essential to the sector. For instance, how will a more positive regulatory framework towards crypto benefit web3 gaming and its tradable assets, especially when fiat currencies are getting roiled?

Moving on and following on from last week’s funding news of Ultra raising $12 million, it was interesting to hear more from the new company CEO Gus van Rijckevorsel about his reasons for investing in the company, and why he decided to get personally involved in the day-to-day running of the gaming platform. In our deep-dive podcast he also explains his bigger ambition for Ultra, and how it aims to turn the company into a unicorn.

We also saw no less than two major web3 gaming ecosystems announce significant restructures and the sunset of their only-just-launched gaming infrastructure. Treasure announced it’s closing down Treasure Chain, and Pixelcraft is shutting down Aavegotchi L3 Geist, saying there’s a consistent lack of “mindshare for L3s”.

Additional news

Jobs news: Azra hires ex-PlayStation Mobile head Kris Davis as CBO

Mobile-first gaming L2 ZKcandy’s mainnet goes live

Pool Masters goes live ahead of How to Train Your Dragon collab

Gamee starts phased launch of degen TCG Moon Cards

Pirate Nation burns 10 million PIRATE tokens and introduces new vesting schedule

BPMG expands into Japanese market and web3 gaming

Horizon Blockchain Games rebrands to Sequence, buys chain abstraction builder Light

4th April

Starting the week, The Sandbox launched Alpha Season 5, mainly revolving around its Jurassic World experience. With $1 million-worth of rewards, the season is running for six weeks and entails over 40 various experiences, new NFT collections, and a revamped Alpha Season Hub.

After a quiet start of the year for funding into web3 gaming, Ultra has announced a significant $12 million funding round raised for its gaming platform. Part of a wider strategic shift, including recently appointing a new leadership, this funding round is said to be followed by a “significant raise” that’s set to close later this year.

The rest of the blockchain gaming week was dominated by token talk, as

  • 1/ Planetarium CEO JC Kim addressed the recent launch of Immortal Rising 2’s IMT launch. Now down around 80% to many airdropped holders’ disappointment, Kim pointed out that the team intentionally didn’t hype the token’s pre-launch price, but am focusing on long-term sustainability and organic growth. 
  • 2/ Gunzilla Games launched its GUN token on Binance at the start of the week, in conjunction with the Gunz mainnet going live. Serving as the utility token for its Gunz blockchain, the token is also integrated with the studio’s high profile battle royale shooter Off The Grid. Despite much anticipation, being the first web3 game to launch on console, GUN has fallen around 61%. The situation certainly wasn’t helped by some early investors claiming that Gunzilla changed the T&C’s last minute, probably due to pressure from Binance, reducing the amount of unlocked tokens and extending the vesting period. Whoever wasn’t happy with these new terms was instead offered a refund. 
  • 3/ RavenQuest launched its QUEST token, now down around 25%. Despite being a very different game to Off The Grid, RavenQuest is a retro style deep MMORPG with QUEST offering various utilities in its farming and crafting loops, it seems gaming tokens are just doomed to plummet regardless of functions and type of game at the moment.
  • 4/ Most surprising and perhaps uplifting news then came in the shape of a partnership announcement between Bisonic and Pixels. This will see the expansion of Pixels’ PIXEL token as it integrates into Forgotten Runiverse. Instead of launching its own, Bisonic is leveraging an already existing live token. This also benefits Pixels as its token gains more utilities, and gets access to more data as it works to increase its return-on-reward ratio as part of its deeper play-to-earn web3 economy.

Not token related, this week saw the launch of One Fight Arena, a match-3 PVP fighting game from Animoca Brands subsidiary Notre Game in collaboration with MMA entity ONE Championship. It’s our Game of the Week.

Additional news

Why gaming’s success on Sui will also drive DeFi adoption

Shrapnel becomes first licensed web3 game on China’s official blockchain

Delabs Games’ Joonmo Kwon on how messenger-based games drive web3 adoption

Pirate Nation launches PVP alongside 10 million PIRATE prize event

Gaming, esports and web3 events coming to Dubai in April/May 2025

Football management MMO Soccerverse partners with HyperPlay

How Beam evolved from an Axie guild to a gaming infra and investment powerhouse

28th March

The ‘don’t call them web3 games, just call them games’ debate may reach a conclusion on Monday 31st March when Gunzilla Games’ GUN token goes live in conjunction with the launch of the GUNZ mainnet.

Ahead of the token listing, Binance has enabled users to stake BNB, FDUSD, and USDC in order to earn GUN tokens, and investors are already piling in. More significantly for players of console shooter Off The Grid, once the GUNZ mainnet is live, they will be able to trade in-game assets such as weapons, cybernetic limbs, and skins. 

In other Gunzilla news, the developer announced it’s acquired traditional game magazine Game Informer after GameStop shut it down in August 2024. This has also sparked some divided opinions.

After coming under scrutiny in 2024 with a call to scale down its $220 million Game Catalyst Program, an Arbitrum DAO member have now proposed the complete sunset of Arbitrum’s gaming fund. With Treasure DAO being one of the strong initiators of the fund, but since leaving Arbitrum for zkSync, and the ARB token down 81%, this seems like a sensible call.

Web3 game ecosystem outfit BoomLand announced this week it’s taking over the future development of mobile shooter Cantina Royale, and will reward Cantina Royale NFT holders with its BOOM token and free NFTs. Working on adding web3 features to already existing web2 mobile games developed by parent company BoomBit, BoomLand has a proven track record in web3 games with its flagship title Hunters On-Chain.

Two weeks after its global launch, we’ve also taken a closer look at RavenQuest, the deep retro PC-based MMORPG, which has already become the third biggest game on Immutable zkEVM in terms of unique active wallets. And most of its web3 features aren’t even live yet.

Additional news

21st March

As GDC is drawing to a close, some attendees have testified to an overall lack of positive sentiment in the games industry. Seeing it from a different perspective – more precisely from a web3 gaming point of view, (what else eh?) – the big positive is that despite strong challenges and numerous self-proclaimed trend experts predicting the industry’s death, we’re not at zero. 

At the same time, we shouldn’t pretend deep problems in need of radical solutions don’t exist, and that’s exactly what Limit Break CEO Gabe Leydon addressed this week in a fireside chat at GDC.

Calling the lack of restrictions in crypto “a disaster” that’s only led to centralized exchanges taking charge instead of developers, his current fix is Apptokens. Whether using Limit Break’s protocol or something similar, it’s clear that a growing number of web3 game developers are asking for and implementing token models whose main purpose is to limit utility to the actual games the tokens are designed for. 

Indeed, even the more sceptical voices admit something needs to be done, but they think Apptokens is taking the matter a step too far in undermining the whole decentralized premise of web3. 

Regardless of what one thinks, the discussion on foundational web3 values and the practical decoding of its root problems should lead to a better path forward.

Earlier in the week, Immutable disclosed its financials for the period July 2022 to June 2023. Although showing the company’s revenue was growing, it’s burning capital at a faster rate. With bookings of $27 million in sales and $77 million in costs, the result is an overall loss of $50 million. 

Obviously, as has been demonstrated by the likes of Animoca Brands over the years, blockchain game companies often have problems getting their annual financial reports completed and audited in time. Where Immutable’s financials are up to today is difficult to judge, but it reported sales in FY23/24 of $43 million. In terms of cash and liquid crypto the company holds, it was $300 million at the end of FY21/22, $280 million in FY22/23 and $140 million at the end of 2024. That’s more than a 50% drop.

During the span of two weeks, four web3 games have announced they’re building for consoles including Xbox, Playstation 5 and even Nintendo. While Off The Grid landed on Xbox and PS5 in October 2024, which was seen as a major milestone for the sector, in the following six months the number has grown to six titles. These include Moonray, The Bornless, My Pet Hooligan, Paradise Tycoon, and Forgotten Runiverse.

The Sandbox announced a multi-year deal with Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment to bring the Jurassic World IP into The Sandbox. This will see the Jurassic World: Dinosaur Preserve experience go live in conjunction with The Sandbox’s forthcoming expansion and Alpha Season 5 in March 2025.

In other exciting news, at least for degens, Yield Guild Games announced its first game LOL Land will launch exclusively on Igloo Inc’s Abstract blockchain on 15th April, including Pudgy Penguins and the ability to earn YGG tokens, Abstract XP and more.

Additional news

14th March

“I don’t just race when it feels easy. When it’s hard, I look for solutions to be able to keep going”.

That’s a quote from ultrarunner Sally McRae, as she competed in one of the +200 mile ultramarathons, but in its simplicity, it’s just as powerful in other areas of life…

Which brings us to web3 gaming.

The number of developers shutting down and discontinuing their games kept growing this week, with Battlebound the latest in line to make a public announcement. Meanwhile, other developers have aired the increasing pressures and impossible expectations they’re facing from investors and communities.

However, in difficult times, some have found rejuvenating strength and worked out new solutions, even ones including letting go and starting over. 

One such obvious case is Sky Mavis and its Axie MMO Atia’s Legacy. The game itself has only been in active development for a year, but the idea of the game springs back a good seven years. Having experimented with multiple games of various success rate to-date, Atia’s Legacy is Sky Mavis’ outworking of all of those combined, with strong elements from both Axie Infinity and Homeland.

No doubt, it’s also learned a thing or two from Pixels and its dedicated attempts at reworking a sustainable P2E model. Ironically, it’s during one of the worst lows the industry has faced that Sky Mavis has chosen to unveil the new title, but it sure seems to have created a lot of excitement as pre-registrations have hit 2.5 million, as of 12th March.

Web3 gaming is far from dead – one might even say it’s inevitable…

For instance, looking at another prominent game many years in the making, Wildcard, we start to see blockchain technology really come into fruition. How’s that? Well, Wildcard announced this week that it’s in fact not going to be a web3 game after all. Instead, the Wildcard ecosystem will entail a separate web3 metagame for the most dedicated blockchain-focused audience. 

Through Playful Studios’ streaming platform Thousands, users will be able to support the game as well as the broader Wildcard universe, and pick up a few WC tokens. These will eventually become tradable and open to speculation, but for now, they’re locked, meaning they’re not tradable, but used only as a tool to build traction and community support.

And to that end, Wildcard is allocating 100% of the token to its community, with the initial drop taking place earlier this week. Being developed and run as a fully web2 game via traditional platforms, Wildcard certainly holds the standard of becoming a big hit, one that its web3 community might well benefit from.

Another game showcasing a strong use case of blockchain technology is CCP Games’ EVE Frontier. Jon Jordan sat down with CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson to talk more about why CCP Games, with its existing EVE Online community being so resistant to web3, chose to build on blockchain, and why the developer is in fact not building a blockchain game at all, but the tools themselves to build EVE Frontier. And it’s for that reason, CCP Games is also open-sourcing its own Carbon game engine to give third party developers access to the code. 

The beautiful thing is, this could not be done without blockchain.

To emphasise our point, in another interview this week, Andy Gore, CEO of football MMO Soccerverse explained its web3 economy (and much more), which is guided by principles of long-term sustainability rather than short term speculation.

As in the case of EVE Frontier, Soccerverse is also deployed fully onchain aiming to last forever, and will eventually open-source its code to third party devs.

Additional news

7th March

There are some bright sparks on the blockchain gaming radar this week.

Parallel completed its esports tournament Parallel Prime Championships, with the winner bagging $100,000. And the game is set for its mobile launch via app stores on 18th March. 

In conjunction with the news, the game’s developer Parallel Studios dropped more details and a first trailer for its forthcoming B3-based shooter, including its official title: Sanctuary.

Experimenting with the creation of real use cases for AI agents, US dev Mystic Moose launched its WorldWide Agent AI-gaming platform this week. Combining web3 elements including its MOJO and WWA token with game-playing AI agents such its own Emma, Brooka and Winston Wylde Alexander, the platform will eventually let users integrate their own agents. The idea is to enable these agents to play and earn within various games, starting with Agents of Poker.

Sky Mavis has no plans to sit back and rely on other developers growing its Ronin ecosystem. Instead, the company has ventured on its most ambitious quest to-date. “Going all in to build a game that everyone loves”, it’s unveiled Atia’s Legacy, which is a MMO set within the Lunacia world. If nothing else, it’s got crypto X digging for more positive adjectives again.

Using familiar assets such as Axie land NFTs and AXS tokens, Atia’s Legacy will be combat-heavy with early gameplay showing squad-based real-time battles, and squads being able to grow and level up their abilities. In addition, there will be PVE quests and missions as well as resource and crafting loops.

Releasing its unaudited financials for Q4 2024, Animoca Brands now has total assets worth $4.3 billion. Bookings for 2024 were up 12% from 2023’s bookings of $280 million to $314 million. Most notable growth was recorded within its Digital Asset Advisory business, growing by 116% YoY to $165 million.

More positive highlights include the upcoming first anniversary of Wemade’s MMORPG Night Crows. With its celebratory event taking place 12th March, users can earn exclusive rewards by pre-registering now.

Top-down sandbox MMORPG RavenQuest launches via mobile on 14th March. Currently live via PC, the release is predicted by Immutable itself to “change the web3 gaming narrative”. 

Finally, CCP Games has appointed a new head of economy, former Central Bank economist Stefán Þórarinsson, for fully onchain EVE Frontier. Using something similar to Apptokens, it’s clear that sustainability is a first priority for this infinite player-driven ecosystem.

Additional links

28th February

A feature or bug, but web3 gaming continues to showcase some of the most tenacious builders out there. One example is Yuga Labs. Since its inception, the company has had its fair share of challenges.

But throughout this, the company has kept building, restructuring, and selling off key projects only to spearhead other parts of its business. Certainly one of Yuga’s biggest milestones will be the anticipated launch of its “persistent” Otherside metaverse in June 2025. 

In preparation for this event, the developer has been stress testing Otherside’s underlying Msquared tech, which allows developers to connect and scale their virtual worlds within the metaverse. In doing so, they launched Project Dragon, a first-person shooter experience, with the aim of breaking the Guinness world record in terms of most concurrent players in an online FPS. Accomplishing this mission, Project Dragon garnered 2,197 players.

In related news, Jon recently had a great interview with Improbable, the company behind Msquared, and its CEO Herman Narula about its Yuga partnership, company history, its 1 million TPS EVM blockchain Somnia, and more.

Another company seeing its way through the trenches is Wemade’s web3 arm Wemix. Adopting an early more-is-more approach in terms of number of titles, it announced a significant pivot to scale down the amount of games in 2024, to instead focus on a few high-end ones.

Now approaching a year since Wemade’s launch of web3-enabled MMORPG Night Crows, the game is reported to hit a reported $200 million in lifetime revenue. Night Crows has a deep web3 economy with only a few scarce onchain assets, with its blockchain features not being unlocked until players reach level 45. Now Wemade has launched its second high-end web3 MMORPG in the form of Norse-themed open world game Legend of Ymir in South Korea. Shortly following its release the game topped Google Play.

On the other spectrum is Immutable, which has gone all in on the high-quantity market strategy and now boasts “+500” games in its ecosystem. Being one of the few gaming tokens among top 100, this strategy seems to have worked well. This week, one of its three unicorn partner companies, Netmarble announced an additional 7 games launching on the Immutable platform in 2025.

Netmarble’s web3 arm Marblex has also undergone a recent rebrand, now fronted by a green goblin called Goby, carrying the “fun comes first” slogan. Perhaps the most exciting game, for all the wrong reasons, coming to Immutable in 2025 is Tokyo Beast. A mix of web2 gaming, esports and NFT-based crypto metagames, Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson thinks it’s one of those that “exemplifies a game that can drive mainstream adoption of blockchain gaming.” In terms of development, Japanese game outfits Cygames and Gumi are listed as partners.

Certainly hit by current headwinds is Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, the studio helmed by industry veteran Chris Heatherly. Announcing this week that it’s suspending development of web3 social deduction game The Mystery Society, Heatherly explained “the only thing there’s less investment for than games are web3 games”. 

After the news went public however, Heatherly has had multiple developers reach out offering him a way forward for the game. From becoming a pure web2 game launching on Steam, to a revitalised version releasing on Ronin.

Additional news

20th February

  • What price will ETH be on March 31st?
  • Will RON hit $10 in 2025?
  • Which Ronin game will hit 300k DAUWs next?

Following last week’s news of Ronin becoming permissionless, one of the first consumer apps is now live on the network. Community Gaming’s prediction market Forkast has launched alongside its CGX ecosystem token, and a Ronin-centric market, letting users place predictions on growth metrics, token prices, and other trends within the network.

Other than that, we’ve dived deeper into Coinbase-based B3 and its vision for an open gaming ecosystem in an interview with NPC Labs’ CEO Daryl Xu. Notably, while other gaming tokens remain in a record slump in terms of performance, the B3 token is an exception with its price up around 60% since last week’s launch.

It’s also signed a recent deal with Indian games outfit SuperGaming, which follows Parallel and InfiniGods in building its own B3 game chain.

Additional news

14th February

As we remember the death of 3rd century Roman saint and Christian martyr Saint Valentine, another week draws to a close. In usual order, we’ve been summarising the latest headlines in blockchain gaming.

Ronin’s open

Sky Mavis’ gaming blockchain Ronin is now open and permissionless. Many games and projects had already announced their deployment to the network prior to the expansion, and some revealed their integration in conjunction with the grand opening. Most surprising, to us at least, is that Proof of Play is integrating its infrastructure with Ronin, although not many details have been revealed yet.

To drive more general network activity around the opening, Ronin has also launched a $100,000 prize pool for NFT trading. Whether related or not, the RON token has now flipped Axie‘s AXS token.

Blocklords goes all out AI

On the web3 games x AI front, Blocklords has announced a significant expansion of its AI agent integration. This will enable players to create their own agents that will assist with trading and farm management. It will also see the addition of autonomous AI-powered heroes and generals being integrated in its forthcoming Battleborne battle mode. 

Treasure launches AI platform

Treasure also introduced its gaming focused AI agent launchpad/platform Mage, which will be powered by Treasure’s ecosystem token MAGIC. As for Treasure, Jon recently spoke to TreasureDAO co-founder Karel Vuong about how the “decentralized gaming console” ecosystem is different to other blockchain game projects, as well as its vision for 2025 as games start to go live on its new ZKsync-based Treasure Chain.

B3 vs G7

As the outlook in tokenland remains bleak, two game projects defied market conditions and launched their tokens B3 and G7 this week. One has surpassed Jon’s expectations, while the other has not.

The Sandbox release Game Maker 0.11

Good old The Sandbox is still building momentum following its successful alpha season 4 at the end of 2024. In the build-up towards its next Builders Challenge, the company has released a significant update to its Game Maker creator tool. 0.11 comes with improvements to multiplayer modes, pre-made templates and dynamic libraries. It also gives content creators wider access to partner brands’ collections including The Smurfs, Care Bears, Atari, and more.

Additional news

7th February

Hit by more macroeconomic uncertainty, crypto took another toll as the week started. As usual, web3 gaming tokens were in no way resistant to the volatility, but saw its already terrible performance drop. But all’s not doom and gloom…

AI agents save the day

In blockchain gaming x AI world,

Planet Mojo unveiled what it calls its dual-reward ecosystem. On one hand it will allow human players of its Agents of Poker game to earn World Points in order to climb the leaderboard and earn rewards. This can either be done by staking MOJO, completing quests, or playing against other players and AI agents. At the same time, players can also earn AgentXP, which can be spent backing and boosting AI agents.

Now these agents can also play and earn by winning tournaments and interacting with players. They earn XP, which determines their place on their own leaderboard, which has its own rewards in the form of WWA tokens.

As one of the earliest projects experimenting with game playing and earning AI agents and their integration with human players, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Agents of Poker is set to launch in the coming weeks.

Following a recent $4 million funding round for its Telegram-based rewards platform Goat Gaming, Mighty Bear Games launched the mint for its AI agent NFTs AlphaGOATs this week. By playing Goat Gaming games, the AlphaGOATs will be able to earn GG token rewards for its human owners.

Faraway Games also launched one of the first modules on its Rift Platform, which enables AI agents to wager and play Rift Arena in order to earn rewards. Prizes are sent to the agent’s treasury.

Mythical Games brings more hope

Not seemingly affected by the current sentiment, Mythical Games’ John Linden has plenty to be excited about for the year ahead. Sharing his outlook in a recent interview/podcast with Jon Jordan, he delves into the team’s learnings from NFL Rivals as it looks ahead towards the launch of FIFA Rivals. Besides that he’s also “super pumped” for Pudgy Party, and feels a sense of accomplishment that four third-party games have partnered with Mythical to launch on its Mythos Chain. Linden’s enthusiasm is contagious. Let the conversation brighten up your day.

But Apptokens are the the new “inevitable”

As already discussed on repeat, game tokens are currently not doing well, and haven’t been for a long time. Of course there are various reasons for this, but one is speculation. When tokens are exposed to it, they are inevitably very vulnerable to market fluctuation. Not seldom are they the first wave of exit liquidity when things get shaky.

In order to prevent pump and dump scenarios prematurely killing game economies, tools like Limit Break’s Apptokens will likely, and hopefully, grow in adoption.

In essence, these are tokens which developers can control through preset parameters. As such their price and liquidity can be in the hands of game developers rather than speculators.

Additional news

31st January

Oh boy, did DeepSeek spice up the tech landscape with its entry this week? Causing a sell-off en masse, including crypto tokens, we took a closer look at how gaming tokens have performed so far in 2025, as well as comparing to the less ideal performance of 2024.

AI, and more AI

The rest of the week continued on a strong AI theme with

  • Faraway Games launching its Rift platform in conjunction with a RIFT token airdrop. As for Rift, it’s described as a “Shopify App Store for AI Agents” through which users can buy various modules and skills to supercharge their AI agents. The result will be intelligent revenue-making bots that can manage things like validating blockchains and creating and selling NFTs.
  • Dacoco launched Lynx, its LLM trained to be an expert on the original Alien Worlds lore, which enables users to expand and make modifications to the Alien Worlds narrative. Community members can then vote on whether to approve the proposed additions. 
  • Sky Mavis announced a deal with ArenaX Labs’ NRN Agents which will eventually see “millions of AI agents coming to Ronin games”. To start with, users can expect proof-of-concept demonstrations of NRN agents in a few games on Ronin to show how they can enhance gameplay.
  • We also looked closer at two key growth engines in web3 gaming in 2025: mobile and AI. Not coincidentally, these alongside HMTL 5, are also a core focus for our upcoming PG Connects San Francisco in March 2025.

Elsewhere

In other news, The Sandbox announced it has expanded its European presence by acquiring dev partner QED, which will form The Sandbox Romania.

Original co-founder and CEO of Neon Machine, the developer of Shrapnel, Mark Long has moved to Unioverse, joining the company as its new CEO.

While most media outlets seems to have reported the misleading news that UK studio Pixion Games raised $12.4 million in its recent funding round, it did in fact announce a strategic funding round without disclosing the amount. For anyone bothering clicking beyond posts on X and navigating to the official medium post, something you’d expect from journalists, it transpires the $12.4 million mentioned is lifetime funding. For the record, the company was founded in 2017.

One has too assume this was either an unfortunate mistake in communication from the company’s social media intern, or a deliberate way to mislead readers and potential supporters of the studio’s mobile action-RPG base builder Fableborne ahead of its token launch. Either way, it’s bad form and not something that increases web3 game developers’ trust account.

24th January

Top 50 – how

Arriving at the launch of our Top 50 blockchain game companies is a mixed bag of relief for having made it, excitement, and to a smaller degree tension. Did we get anything completely wrong? Are we stepping on anybody’s sore toes?

All-in-all though, as our Top 50 2025 feature was revealed live at PG Connects London this week and published online a day later, the process as well as reception has been very positive. For each year the still young industry matures, the selection of companies that matter becomes more refined, and obvious. Particularly following a more challenging year such as 2024, much of the chaff has been swept away.

With that in mind, do listen to today’s podcast discussion to get an idea of how we work out which companies make it to the final 50, and how they’re ranked.

Also, a special congratulations to the top 10, and of course #1 Proof of Play!

Soccerverse live matches – first impression

To say the enthusiasm has been growing in the Jordan household this week with the first live matches being played in Polygon-based fully onchain football MMO Soccerverse, is an understatement. Of course, there’s been some level of disappointment too, as everyone can’t win, which is hard to face when you’re eight years old. Nonetheless, the experience of buying clubs, managing teams, and setting up their match tactics, has gotten everyone hungry for more.

Now with +1,000 managers and counting the game is off to a good start. 

Telegram x TON go exclusive

Initially, the news that Telegram and TON blockchain have signed an exclusivity deal, might be a surprise. Web3 games looking to launch via Telegram must now use TON Connect to provide web3 wallets and other blockchain features. That there is a bunch of games on other networks such as Ronin, Polygon, Immutable, and most recently HYCHAIN, that will now have to either scrap their Telegram plans or migrate or expand to TON, is not a surprise. But clearly those games can’t be so many that Telegram considers it a big loss.

Gaming on Abstract Chain

Pudgy Penguins head company Igloo and its Abstract chain has been picking up momentum, and unveiled +30 games deploying on the network, in addition to D20 Labs’ Royal Nutz Poker Club.

Line Next launches mini-dapps on LINE Messenger

Line Next’s mini-dapps within LINE Messenger have gone live including Slime Miner, Bombie and Cattea, Captain Tsubasa -RIVALS- on LINE, and 30 more apps and games. During 2025, Line Next hopes to roll out over 1,000 games via the social platform.

First fair launch token launchpad on Ronin

Two days after Moku launched its Tama Meme token launchpad on Ronin, over 7,000 meme tokens have been created. The memecoin hype is everywhere, so why wouldn’t it also carry over to Ronin? It also makes sense that the community would pile in and use Tama Meme, as more trading on Ronin means added utility for the larger ecosystem.

More tokens

In a similar manner to Pudgy Penguins’ high-profile PENGU airdrop at the end of 2024, OG NFT collection Azuki has rewarded its community, and holders of a selection of other early NFTs, with a 55% allocation of its ANEMI token.

As icing on the cake, InifiniGods (King of Destiny, Infinimerge, Immortal Rising) has kept building momentum before its GOD token airdrop, scheduled for Friday 24th January.

Gaming AI wrap

If you live in the US, you can now get an Operator (still known as an AI agent for us living in yesterday) to do your online shopping for you. Operator has been launched on trial by OpenAI, and granted it’s successful, will launch worldwide. In other more debatable OpenAI news, the entity has unveiled new company The Stargate Project, which will look to invest a mind-bogglingly $500 billion ($500 billion is a ridiculous number) over the next four years into AI infrastructure for OpenAI’s US department.

More specifically on the gaming AI front, one of the most prominent and earliest web3 x AI games Today, later named Today The Game, has undergone a rebrand and is now called Youmio. This is closely related to the developer’s enhanced focus on its AI agents creation platform.

Finally, in this month’s Mavens feature, our industry experts give their views on whether gaming AI agents are here for the long term, or not.

17th January

Ronin nears opening of network

Building momentum ahead of Ronin becoming an open blockchain, Sky Mavis has launched a $10 million ecosystem grants program, which consists of two separate grants.

No doubt many projects will migrate to Ronin in the coming months. One game that announced its move this week was 3v3 mobile basketball game Rumble Kong League.

Meanwhile, Ronin’s now second most popular game in terms of daily active players, Sky Mavis’ flagship title Axie Infinity saw its treasury grow by $4 million in 2024. Starting 2024 with a player base of around 15,000, Axie now has around 120,000 daily active players, which is one of the main drivers behind its increased trading volume. 

The most popular game not just on Ronin but in web3 gaming, social RPG Pixels, has released an overview of its 2024 financials. Thanks to reworking its rewards structure with the intention to tackle bot activity, the game saw a major and steady drop in active players throughout the year, ending at 283,000 DAUWs. At the same time however, the number of accounts spending PIXEL tokens in-game grew steadily, as did the average spend per wallet. 

Significantly then, Pixels ended 2024 with a ‘return on reward’ ratio of 0.5, up from under 0.25 in May, meaning that for every 100 PIXEL given out as rewards, 50 PIXEL were spent in-game.

AI x web3 games wrap

In terms of AI agents in web3 gaming this week, Planet Mojo’s MOJO AI agent Emma did a podcast with Gam3s Lobby agent, and in a similar experimental fashion, Blocklords has released AI agent Elisa Revard, which is part of its wider game dynasty. Users who are interested can pay a nominal fee to try and persuade Elisa, who is programmed to not agree, to marry them. Aside from the glory, the successful user brings home the full prize pot.

Embracing AI tech to the fullest is Mighty Bear Games and its Telegram-based Goat Gaming platform. This week the dev revealed playing and revenue making AI agents AlphaGOATs, which will be able to play games, enter prediction markets, venture down the UGC path, and more. AlphaGOATs go on sale on 6th February.

To help you keep track of what’s happening in the intersection of generative AI and web3 gaming, we’ve compiled a handy list, which is updated regularly.

The Sandbox’s vision for 2025

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, Jon Jordan talked to The Sandbox COO Sebastien Borget about how the metaverse project progressed in 2024 and what’s in store for 2025. More particularly, how The Sandbox’s vision has become more refined and grown stronger through decentralization.

BlockchainGamer at PGC London

Join us at PG Connects London on 20-21st January, where Jon will reveal our Top 50 blockchain game companies of 2025. Other web3 content includes talks from Helika’s Marc Alloul, Tezos’ Sofia Senatorova, Laos Network’s Alun Evans, and more.

Additional news

10th January

If 2024 ended on a strong AI-themed note, 2025 has started with an even stronger AI-focus in terms of web3 games. A natural symbiosis many might say, in that both technologies benefit from and even enhance each other.

GenAI x web3 gaming wrapper

  • Ex-BreederDAO Sovrun and AI platform Virtuals introduced their joint venture ReadyGamer, with the purpose of disrupting AI and blockchain-based gaming leveraging Virtual’s GAME toolset.
  • Planet Mojo accelerated its WorldWide Agents gaming platform and first game Agents of Poker with the launch of AI agent WWA and the WWA token, both of which are closely integrated with Planet Mojo’s web3 ecosystem. WWA is also based on Virtuals.
  • Illuvium, which recently announced it’s looking for further funding, also announced a partnership with Virtuals this week. Using Virtual’s GAME tech stack, Illuvium will integrate autonomous decision-making NPCs in its three games Overworld, Arena, and Illuvium Zero. In 2025, the developer has said it will mainly focus on enhancing Overworld.
  • One of the pioneering web3/AI games Today said it was going to extend its AI agent Limbo into a launchpad for 3D AI agents that can be integrated into Today, as well as other games and apps.
  • As its gearing up for Open Ronin in February, Sky Mavis has also launched its own AI agent called Jaihoz. Built in partnership with Virtuals, Ronin describes it as “more than an exciting experiment: this is the union of two movements with a deep understanding of digital worlds.”
  • In his latest AI Gamechangers newsletter, Dave Bradley talks to ArenaX Labs’ Brandon Da Silva about AI agents in games, more particularly ARC and AI Arena.

Limit Break launches Apptokens

After announcing significant advancements to its ERC721-C NFT protocol at the end of 2024, Limit Break has introduced its cross-chain TokenMaster protocol, including ERC20-C Apptokens. In short, this protocol enables developers to regulate the pricing, pairing and accessibility to their tokens etc. in order to create isolated game economies. Designed to be used within games or ecosystems, developers can gradually choose to let token holders trade a percentage of their tokens on exchanges. It’s also worth pointing out that this launch was likely a necessary predecessor to the rollout of Limit Break’s mobile web3 game DigiDaigaku, of which we can probably expect to hear lots more about in 2025.

From Crypto Unicorns to Neo Olympus

In one of the most insightful and honest episodes of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, Jon Jordan talks to Laguna Labs’ CEO Aron Beierschmitt about the hard learnings from leaving behind debut game Crypto Unicorns and moving to new project Neo Olympus. A fully onchain game using the MUD engine and running on the B3 blockchain, Neo Olympus is set for its genesis NFT mint sometime later in January.

Soccerverse launch

UK studio Soccerverse has launched its fully onchain football management MMO. After almost a year in beta testing, Soccerverse season 1 is now live, with the initial phase allowing users to buy player packs and set up teams, sign up as managers and prepare their strategies ahead of the first match week, which is set to begin on 18th January.

Sonzai Labs launches web3/AI-driven mafia game

New game developer Sonzai Labs has launched Telegram-based social mafia game TeleMafia. Including founders such as ex-Limit Break game designer Ryan Foo and ex-Tiltyard engineering lead Ian Leck, Sonzai has backing from well-known crypto angels such as Gabe Leydon, Gabby Dizon, and Jeff Zirlin, and more. As for its use of AI, the team will leverage the technology to create web3-based social experiences free from blockchain complexities.

ZkCandy L2 raises $4 million

Mobile game publisher iCandy has announced that its ZKsync-based L2 ZKcandy has raised $4 million. The chain generated over 2 million wallets during its testnet phase in late 2024 as it builds to launch an ecosystem that will combine the virality of Telegram mini-apps within the market-leading EVM blockchain environment.

20th December

It’s our final roundup of the year but the news just isn’t stopping in blockchain gaming world.

In fact, things are accelerating as projects detail their plans for 2025 and provide the final details of what they’ve been up to this year.

One such is Illuvium, which has revealed it’s going to be focusing on its open world action-RPG Overworld in 2025, but that it’s also going to need some more funding. Funding of a different source was highlighted by Fableborne, which completed its third season testing – its first on Ronin – generating $540,000 from 149,000 players during the 18 day event.

Of course, the really big numbers of the week have come from Pudgy Penguins, which launched its PENGU token. That’s currently worth $1.7 billion and has triggered plenty of speculation about which NFT projects will be next?

As for future growth, much of the focus is around gaming and AI agents, with the Virtuals platform continuing to be the place to launch agents. One recent example of note is Faraway Games’ J3FF bot, which will be a node validator when the Fchain goes live in 2025. Of course, J3FF has also airdropped his own memecoin to holders of various NFTs including Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, and HV-MTLs.

Not using Virtuals, Planet Mojo is gearing up for its Agents of Poker, which will see agents and human players wagering MOJO tokens, while bluffing and trash-talking to the extent that their LLMs allow.

Blockchain gaming platform Xterio is also getting in on the act, with a vision statement for 2025, which including Pixels-with-AI-agents games Palio and its ongoing Befriend AI chat-to-airdrop event, which has already attracted over 1 million wallets.

13th December

Only a week away until the hours of daylight increase again, and 2024 mere days away from a close, we continue to check in with the leaders of the web3 games industry. In our End-of-Year series they share reflections on the past year as well as predictions for 2025.

Talking of industry leaders, we’re also in full swing unveiling our Top 31 in the form of a blockchain gaming 2024 advent calendar. Counting down all the way to 31st December, we’re now into the top 20!

Apeiron dungeon crawler live via app stores

Ronin-based god-game-infused-dungeon-crawler Apeiron from Foonie Magus has gone live through mobile app stores this week. Formally titled Apeiron: Godline Genesis, the mobile-version is currently geographically limited to southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Japan. 

Ubisoft’s Captain Laserhawk launch

Ubisoft’s competitive topdown shooter Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. is going live on Wednesday 18th December. Deploying on the Arbitrum L2 blockchain, Ubisoft is hoping to drive engagement through the game’s open governance, which allows players to participate in decisions such as game mechanics, map designs, and storyline developments, all influencing the Captain Laserhawk experience. 

Laguna Labs’ second game unveiled

After a period of quiet, Laguna Labs (ex-Laguna Games) has unveiled its new web3 title Neo Olympus. A fully onchain game, Laguna calls it its “second economic network” following the first one, Crypto Unicorns, which has now fully been handed over to its community via a DAO. 

Soccerverse launch

Another fully onchain game, football/soccer management and economic MMO Soccerverse from UK developer Soccerverse, is launching on 9th January 2025. This allows players time to explore the shop, buy game packs, sign up as managers etc. ahead of the first game season of biweekly matches starting 18th January.

Treasure L2 launches on ZKsync

Following its surprise move to ZKsync shortly after instigating a $200 million fund for gaming on Arbitrum, Treasure’s Treasure L2 mainnet is now live. Using its MAGIC token for gas, the Treasure rollup is supported and serviced by Matter Labs, the developer behind ZKsync.

Alongside the launch, an account and wallet system called Treasure Connect has also launched for gamers, while Treasure SDK is now available for developers looking to get their games working on the network.

Hytopia parts ways with Minecraft

After what it describes as a journey of “hell and high water”, the Hytopia team is ending the year by announcing it’s pivoting away from Minecraft, in order to build a fully independent tech stack for the Hytopia UGC platform.

Beam Ventures’ $150 million fund

Operated by Merit Circle, Abu Dhabi-based Beam Ventures has launched with a $150 million web3 AI gaming fund. 

“We’re convinced that Abu Dhabi is set to be the epicenter of the world’s most exciting, pioneering tech and gaming innovation for years and decades to come,” commented Beam Ventures chief strategy officer Mark Borsten.

Additional news

6th December

For the first time, Bitcoin hit $100,000 this week. A huge milestone for sure, but not an unpredicted one. Market trends have pointed to this moment for some time, and the US presidential election was the final nail, turning matters from if to when.

Pudgy Penguins launches PENGU token

Similarly, it’s no big surprise that Pudgy Penguins headco Igloo announced its plans to launch Pudgy Penguins ecosystem token PENGU sometime in the coming three and a half weeks remaining of 2024. Obviously in the pipeline for months if not years, if one were to launch a token in 2024, this would be the ultimate time.

EVE Frontier closed alpha

In good time for the winter holidays, CCP Games has also announced its fully onchain sandbox game EVE Frontier enters closed alpha on 10th December. Building on hardcore PC MMOG EVE Online, it will eventually be free-to-play, but participants looking to join the closed playtest require a founder pack which is for sale via the EVE Frontier website.

NFL Rivals hit $10 million trading volume

A good prediction one might say, in January 2024 we named Mythical Games the top blockchain game company in our Top 50, so it’s good to see the developer performing well in terms of onchain trading volume. Our latest tracking reports its mobile-based American football game NFL Rivals, arguably one of the most successful web3 games to date, hit $10 million in lifetime NFT trading volume in November. With FIFA Rivals, Blankos mobile, and Pudgy Party all in the making, Mythical is set for another top year as we approach 2025.

Adopt an axie news

Growing from 15,000 daily active users at the start of 2024, to currently around 100,000, Sky Mavis’ Axie Infinity has launched a new service called Axie Adoption Center. A way to bring new players onboard, it enables delegation of axie NFTs to new users who don’t hold any axies, with the eventual opportunity to earn said axies by accumulating enough points within a 30-day period.

Pixels Guild Wars #2

Continuing on the theme of successful games, 2024’s most popular web3 game by active user wallets, Pixels, has unveiled Guild Wars #2. With a prize pool of $4 million worth of PIXEL, game CEO Luke Barwikowski is as determined as ever to prove play-to-earn can work, commenting “With this event, we’re experimenting to find out what’s possible in web3 gaming and laying the groundwork for regular large-scale competitions that will create a positive outcome for the ecosystem.”

Overworld+Rough House=Reach Labs

On a different mission, more particularly to address web3 game marketing virality, Overworld and Rough House Games have joined forces to launch a new publishing platform and entity called Reach Labs.

Additional news

29th November

With only one month left to go of 2024, it will be interesting to see whether projects announcing Q4 rollouts will still deliver before the year’s end. 

Two things that Blockchaingamer.biz will provide during December is our advent calendar, containing a rundown of the top 31 people in the blockchain gaming sector 2024.

We’re also rolling out our End-of-Year series, where leading names in the blockchain game industry share their views on what happened in 2024, and their predictions for 2025. 

Looking back, the remarkable growth of Telegram mini-games has been one of the dominating and unpredicted forces this past year, accompanied by the virality of associated games such as Notcoin and Hamster Kombat. Some would argue that it’s not the strength of those games in themselves that’s been attracting players en masse, but rather their accessibility and seamless user experience. Perhaps not the case anymore, but that used to be seen as one of the big painpoints standing in the way of web3 going mainstream. A quick glance through 2023’s End-of-Year features shows Telegram was not mentioned once.

On that note, in a post on X Limit Break’s Gabe Leydon has loudly and concisely expressed his predictions on the future of the crypto industry, stating that “Wallet abstraction and focusing on UI/UX for crypto is a total waste of time. AI agents will be doing all of this for you very soon.” 

“Crypto will not need UI/UX,” he adds.

In case Leydon’s correct, web3 gaming could be closer to its mainstream breakthrough sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile, one of the consistently most popular blockchain games in 2024, Pixels, and its CEO Luke Barwikowski is sure he and his team is on the path of solving another major itch, frail and unsustainable play-to-earn models. In a post on X, he says, “I’ve never been more certain that Pixels is going to solve play-to-earn fundamentals.

Over the last 30 days 10.65m PIXEL were spent in-game (over $2m in USD).” 

Indeed, Pixels, along with Off The Grid, is one of the reasons Carv’s CFO Leo Li is bullish on blockchain gaming in 2025.

Finally, let’s look at some of this week’s headline news

22nd November

This time of November, in 1577, English explorer Sir Francis Drake had just set sail on his circumnavigation of the world. No doubt, this was no simple task back then (and probably still isn’t…), but would have required a large dose of courage and an even greater scoop of curiosity and internal motivation to explore the unknown.

This brings me to – what is required from some of the game industry pioneers we see today.

With the uncertainty of where AI is going to take us, we checked in with our mavens to get their views on the intersection of web3 games and genAI.

Limit Break launches NFT creator-first protocols

And talking of pioneers, game developer Limit Break has made its NFT creator protocols permissionless for deployment on any EVM chain and from any wallet.

More than a technical detail, this, the company says, has instigated a “permanent shift”, in turning the web3 sector creator-first. Essentially, Limit Break’s Creator Token Standard 4.0 and Payment Processor 3.0 put NFT creators in control of royalties as well as the business uses of their assets. 

Inherently, to some extent this dilutes decentralization by adding strongly centralized features, but Limit Break says these are required to ensure creators can be justly rewarded for their work. 

Still working on its mobile game DigiDaigaku, the developer has somewhat shifted its focus to develop infrastructure. First launching its DigiDaigaku Genesis NFTs in 2022, it quickly realized the need for protocols enforcing royalties and more control for NFT creators. Now the company has said the next step is to extend these concepts to tokens with its ERC20C protocol.

KGeN $10 million funding

Gaming guild KGeN (Kratos Gamer Network) has raised $10 million from what it calls an ecosystem funding round, taking its total raised to $30 million. The round was led by Aptos Labs, with participation from Polygon and Game7.

Previously called IndiGG, KGeN is headquartered in India. It claims 10.8 million registered gamers and 3.3 million MAUs, of which a majority is based in India, Brazil, and Nigeria.

YGG’s Onchain Guilds platform on Base

As part of its YGG Play Summit event this week, web3 games guild Yield Guild Games announced that its new Onchain Guilds platform will launch on Ethereum L2 Base. 

Onchain Guilds aims to enable digital gaming communities, and other groups, to build fully onchain, with access to identity and community management tools. These include treasury wallets, project dashboards, and NFT minting features.

In an interview from June 2024 with YGG founder Gabby Dizon emphasized that YGG wasn’t going to launch its own blockchain. In fact, he said, “I think it’s really stupid that everyone is looking to pivot to their own L2 or L3. Everyone is trying to sell their own block space. We’re not selling any block space. We’re looking to fill up block space with people and with actions going onchain.” The announcement of Onchain Guilds then, can be seen as the fulfilment of such comments.

Of course, the news is good for Coinbase’s Base blockchain too, which has continuously gained momentum in terms of gaming throughout 2024. For instance, Blocklords Dynasty deployed on the L2 in the summer of 2024, while Superchamps migrated its gaming ecosystem, and gaming-centric L3 B3 is building on Base.

Guild of Guardians new guardian NFTs

Immutable’s mobile squad RPG Guild of Guardians has released two new Guardians in the form of legendary mage Hana and epic goblin Dribb.

Both characters can be acquired using Prayers or Calling Crystals. Prayers can be bought through Eri’s Store and Calling Crystals are available from the in-game store. Alternatively, you can just buy them from NFT marketplaces such as Token Trove. Hana is currently priced $50 and Dribb at $5.

Fableborne launches season 3

Looking for a game to play this weekend? Dive into Pixion Games’ mobile build-and-raid action RPG Fableborne, season 3. Now live on Ronin.

Additional news

15th November

Lessons from a Pixels CEO

As general crypto sentiment keeps going up, will web3 gaming follow suit?

For that to realise, game developers would do good in adopting a similar approach to Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski and his “scrappy” team. As we’ve hit the one-year mark since the game’s migration to Ronin, Barwikowski shared some of the lessons he’s learnt about play-to-earn, dropping token prices, and the recipe to steady growth in terms of real unique players.

“Moving quickly – getting things 80% right and not waiting for perfect conditions – has been crucial to our success,” he said. Of course, it’s not been a plain-sailing year for the team. When asked whether the falling price of PIXEL was nagging him, Barwikowski said he remains focused on the long-term goal, “Managing the complexities of a live token economy has taught us the importance of precision, especially as we work toward our key milestone of sustainability: achieving net ecosystem spend, where users spend more PIXEL in-game than we distribute each month,” 

Certainly an interview worth checking out.

Pirate Nation season 3

Another team learning from its own experiments of having both a game and token live for some time is Proof of Play, which rolled out season 3 of its fully onchain social RPG Pirate Nation this week. Apart from notable gameplay changes, this event allows players to collect points for their in-game actions, but more significantly, it offers high multipliers for players that stake their Ethereum-based PIRATE token by rolling over their rewards from previous seasons.

On an even deeper level, season 3 is a step closer to realising Proof of Play’s vision for an “advanced onchain infrastructure”, through which it hopes to enable “developers to build games onchain faster than offchain”. That’s no small feat.

Off The Grid‘s daily $3,000 prize tournament

Continuing to deliver at the back of its recent console/PC launch, Gunzilla Games has kicked off OTG Clash for Cash, a daily $3,000 prize pool tournament, in Off The Grid. Landing a top 10 spot on the leaderboard, which is reset every 24 hours, makes players eligible for a share of the prize.

Fableborne -> Ronin

Talking of Pixels migration to Ronin, this week Pixion Games announced its build-and-raid action RPG Fableborne is migrating from Avalanche to Ronin. Partnering with Sky Mavis, Pixion hopes Ronin’s increased focus on mobile games will help solve some of the issues in mobile gaming in general. Ronin’s player-centric community also means Fableborne might see a boost in terms of engagement.

3/4 2004 State of Web3 Gaming

Game7 has launched its State of Web3 Gaming report, capturing sector trends up till 30th September, so effectively 3/4 of 2024. Not surprisingly, Telegram is hailed the clear winner in terms of platform with most new web3 games, whereas Immutable has seen the most growth in terms of games migrating from other ecosystems, notably from Polygon. It also highlights the growth of L2/L3 chains, especially in terms of specific gaming L3s.

Team Liquid -> Sui

Finally, top esports outfit Team Liquid has relaunched its fan engagement platform MyBlue on Mysten Labs’ Sui blockchain. This reinforces Mysten Labs and Sui’s gaming focus, something which has been growing steadily throughout 2024.

Additional news

8th November

2024 has been a difficult year in terms of blockchain gaming sentiment so it was interesting to have the privilege of publishing Blocklords CEO David Johansson’s take on the current state of web3 gaming.

A true gaming enthusiast, he says he’s feeling increasingly frustrated about the resistance to the sector and its groundbreaking opportunities. At the same time however, he is hopeful for the future, highlighting Off The Grid and Blocklords as bright examples. In closing, he argues that developers, journalists and influencers, as well as investors, all need to do their part for the web3 gaming market to start flourishing. 

Some would argue the brightest spark throughout 2024 has been the growth of Telegram mini-games. Although most of them are underpinned by the TON ecosystem, an increasing number are launching on Telegram as a way to grow a user base that can then be funnelled to external networks. 

Such is the most recent case of Immutable, which has integrated more advanced community building tools for Telegram, notably by letting developers integrate Immutable Passport within their Telegram apps.

Following on from last week’s news of Delabs Games pivoting to Telegram in an effort to launch midcore games via the platform, the South Korean developer unveiled the first games it will launch as part of its new business strategy. In Q1 2025, a game based on the well-known Ragnarok IP will launch in the shape of a maze-focused RPG. During Q3 2025 it’s set to launch mobile sports title Boxing Star, which saw success while launched on Telegram’s South Korean equivalent Kakaotalk under the lead of Delabs’ parent company 4:33 Creative Labs.

Approaching the one year anniversary since Nine Chronicles launched via mobile, Planetarium has released new figures showing strong growth in terms of staking and token spending. However, the developer is struggling to retain players and see them advance past the game’s mid-stages. To that end, it keeps working on better balancing models, including new features, reward systems and also deeper community engagement.

Boomland has kicked off Season 2 of its BOOM airdrop campaign in Hunters On-Chain, including $1 million worth of BOOM. What’s different this time is that the campaign is launched in collaboration with Game7, via a Lootdrop campaign, which means users need to sign-up to the Game7 Portal to join. How will this impact user numbers?

A month after one of the most significant web3 game launches to-date, Off The Grid has gained the spot as the most popular blockchain game. But what does developer Gunzilla Games think of Off The Grid’s PS5 and Xbox launch, and its initial reception? What’s the actual story about the one-million-a-day-marketing? And where is the game going next? All this and more is discussed in Jon’s latest podcast interview with Gunzilla’s director of web3 Theodore Agranat and Ava Labs’ head of marketing for gaming Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper.

Lastly, we look at one of the most promising games on Ronin, Wild Forest, and why this mobile RTS has grown to sustain over 100,000 DAUWs.

Additional news

1st November

While Jon has kept occupied tracking floor prices and buying (too many) Blankos NFTs on Mythical Games’ marketplace, and neatly listed the prices on his Blankos spreadsheet dating back to 2022, Mythical revealed the title of its forthcoming mobile game based on the Pudgy Penguins IP. Called Pudgy Party, the game is described as a fun social royale including obstacle courses, PvP, and customization features. Slated to release sometime in 2025, Mythical is also busy rebooting its OG PC party game Blankos Block Party for mobile, which is also expected to drop sometime next year.

In other news, Immutable has become the first web3 game-centric company targeted by the SEC. Saying it’s received a Wells notice about a pre-launch investment into its IMX token in 2021, Immutable does not seem too worried about it, instead stating it’s “ready to join the companies fighting for crypto, and defend digital ownership in gaming.” Even for the SEC, the case is odd as it hasn’t anything to do with the US directly either, as the deal highlighted by SEC is between Chinese company Huobi, and Immutable, which is Australian.

Enhancing its image as a gaming-friendly blockchain, Sui has announced another title coming to its handheld gaming device SuiPlay0X1. Mobile MMORPG Shodown Samurai R – initially launched in 1993 by SNK and relaunched in 2019 – is now being rebooted by Korean studio LumiWave to launch on Sui sometime in 2025.

The Sandbox is on a roll to hit new highs following the launch of Alpha Season 4. Already garnering over 276,000 unique players, Sebastien Borget sees it as an indication that the metaverse is “alive and well”. With 30,000 alpha passes sold as part of its battle pass system, the big driver of the growth could be due to the generous SAND token rewards this season offers. For instance, having an alpha pass allows for x13 more SAND rewards compared to non-holders.

Another web3 game developer has made the leap to Telegram and TON, with South Korean outfit Delabs Games announcing its pivot to the messenger platform. Backed by fresh funding from TON Foundation, it looks to follow in the footsteps of parent company 4:33 Creative Labs and release mid-to-hardcore games, moving beyond the hypercasual mini-games currently dominating the ecosystem. Changing distribution strategy also means the development of Delabs’ two titles Space Frontier and Metabolts will be halted.

And talking of Telegram, another company hoping to bring Telegram gaming beyond its current frame of mind is Telegram game publisher TonTon Games. This week Jon had an insightful podcast conversation with its CEO, and startup enthusiast, Daniil Shcherbakov about the prospect of deeper web3 games on Telegram, that don’t necessarily require tokens to scale.

Additional news

25th October

Shoutout to web3 games platform Ultra, on which you can find Ubisoft’s recently launched Champions Tactics. Likewise, Planet Mojo recently released its chests on Base. Thanks for the pristine caps guys!

While we’ve seen a couple of surprising pivots in the web3 gaming space this week, the Q3 Big Blockchain Game Report had few surprises on offer.

In essence, the data shows that challenges becoming more apparent during Q2 largely spilled over into Q3. For instance, a majority of game token prices continued to fall during Q3. Sector investment during Q3 totalled $128 million, down 57% compared to the previous quarter. The one bright exception was the growth of Telegram games supporting the TON blockchain. However, how this will perform long-term is unclear as the post-airdrop issues of Hamster Kombat and Catizen demonstrate the weakness of many of these early projects. 

In an unexpected move, PC mech shooter MetalCore, marketed as one of the top games on Immutable, is migrating to Solana. Surprising in more ways than one, although Solana does have the ability to be EVM compatible, it doesn’t natively support Ethereum assets. With its 10,000 genesis NFTs on Ethereum, MetalCore will launch on Solana in conjunction with its second season kicking off in November.

Another surprise pivot comes from Uprising Labs, which is ditching its plans to build an Oasys-based gaming L2 to instead focus on publishing PC/console games.

In our latest Mavens feature, our blockchain gaming expert panel dived into the issue of lacking crypto regulations and how it impacts game developers.

We’ve also been talking to Mysten Labs head of gaming partnerships Anthony Palma about the growing gaming ecosystem on Sui.

Lastly, Ronin-based Meta Icons Lab announced it’s raised $9 million for mobile web3 gaming series Party Icons.

Additional news

18th October

With Off The Grid now a wee- post-launch via PS5, Xbox and Epic Games Store, some of the industry’s initial reactions has been entertaining us. Limit Break’s Gabe Leydon – who loves big marketing but hates play-to-earn – has hailed it web3’s new Axie-moment. Sky Mavis’ co-founder and COO Aleksander Larsen has more moderately called it “interesting”, but also pointed out why it’s not a game suitable for Ronin.

Beyond narrow crypto gaming circles, the backlash has already started, with more traditional opinionators calling it the “So-Called Web3 Game Megahit”. But take heart, the industry has responded in an orderly manner, with Delphi Ventures’ Piers Kicks highlighting how blockchain will enhance the game – eventually.

In terms of other major headlines it’s been all about Azra Games and its $42.7 million series A funding for codenamed game Project Legends. Although no notable blockchain features or deployment plans have yet been unveiled, the recent funding seems to revolve around Azra Labs, which is a new dev arm focusing on enhancing content creation with the integration of AI.

Another deal announced was Oxalis Games which has raised $2 million for farming RPG Moonfrost.

As for blockchain game investments more generally, 2024 is looking bleak, with Q3 hitting a low of $128 million invested. In total so far 2024 is down 31% compared to the same period in 2023.

US studio Faraway Games has unveiled the legally independent F Foundation, which will launch and operate gaming-centered L1 blockchain Fchain. Based on Avalanche, Fchain is built to support numerous developers creating interoperable web3 game economies, starting with Faraway’s own ecosystem games.

BlockchainGamer editor-at-large Jon Jordan recently sat down for a great chat with Sky Mavis co-founder Jeff Zirlin to talk about how genAI fits into the Axie ecosystem, Ronin’s recent growth spurt and future transition into a permissionless zkEVM rollup, and more.

Finally, one year on since our first conversation with Dragginz co-founder Donna Powell, the former Neopets creators have announced its first playable is expected in late November.

Additional news

11th October

Perhaps moving into the final quarter of the year is why we’re starting to see more action in terms of actual game launches. This week we discuss:

Gunzilla Games’ launch of extraction royale thirdperson shooter Off The Grid through PS5 and on PC via Epic Games Store. Alongside the launch, it’s also running pioneer playtests on Xbox Series X. So why is this significant? With at least $100 million raised, it’s the first true triple-A title to launch in the web3 sector, but it’s also the first to land on console. And it’s seemingly already got some web3 features live.

We also talk about the partnership between Ubisoft’s Captain Laserhawk The G.A.M.E. and NFT marketplace Magic Eden. Notably, it will be the first Arbitrum-based game to mint on Magic Eden.

As for exciting launches, Ubisoft also announced its tactical RPG Champions Tactics, initially set for release in early 2024, which is based on Japanese blockchain Oasys, will drop Wednesday 23rd October.

No less than five years into development, The Sandbox has released Alpha Season 4. Comprising a $2.5 million SAND prize pool, the ten week-long season also comes with a new battle pass system, over 100 brand new experiences, and a social meeting place called the Alpha Hub. However good it is to see The Sandbox release a new (alpha) season, the prospect of a big breakthrough is likely not going to happen until it’s available on mobile though.

Immutable’s mobile squad RPG Guild of Guardians unveiled its biggest expansion to date, Frostmire, which will drop Wednesday 16th October. Among new features to expect are locations and dungeons as part of the main Adventure mode, as well as new gameplay elements and two new legendary guardians.

Are we starting to see the contours of what will be the future of how web3 games best leverage Telegram? At least it seems some developers are finding a way beyond tapping craze and token hype, with Tatsu Works’ Lumina Hunt being one example. 

Serving as a companion game to Tatsumeeko, the RPG that recently migrated to Ronin, Lumina Hunt lets players collect Vabloons, which is the points-based currency used to rank players on a leaderboard. The higher you rank, the more TATSU tokens you will eventually be airdropped. Despite mainly revolving around leaderboard placement and earning a token essentially useful for a different game, Lumina Hunt is good enough in itself compared to most Telegram games so far. 

Finally, a game that doesn’t just use the slogan “game first, crypto second” as a selling point, but is actual proof of it, launched open beta via Steam and Epic Games Store this week. And in conjunction with the launch, Jon has been talking to Bazooka Tango CEO Bo Daly about what makes tactics card game Shardbound stand out visually and narratively, it’s blockchain strategy, and his future vision for the Shardbound universe. 

Additional news

4th October

How has Bitcoin’s positive sentiment impacted gaming tokens? Not a lot it seems. As we’ve entered Q4, the trend of tanking gaming tokens is largely carried over from the previous quarter, and the one prior to that. What about the games themselves? They give us reason to be more optimistic.

Three projects in particular are subject to discussion this week:

  • Shardbound from US dev Bazooka Tango is launching via Steam and Epic Games on 9th October. This open beta comes with refined features, deeper strategic depth, adding colour and brightness to the game landscape.
  • As it draws closer to a Q4 2024 launch, Gunzilla Games’ PC/console thirdperson shooter Off The Grid is available for playtesting on Xbox. Backed by over $100 million, Off The Grid is likely to first real triple A blockchain-enabled game, so how it’s received could have a significant impact on the industry.
  • Paul Bettner’s Playful Studios unveiled Thousands, its blockchain-based community streaming platform built in stealth over the last year (or more). Designed to scale the studio’s own esports-focused MOBA Wildcard, Bettner’s deeper vision of Thousands is to create strong in-game communities, beyond the bounds of Wildcard however. In conjunction with the short demo of the platform, significant enhancements to the game itself were also displayed, including deeper strategic options and a new endgame mechanism.

Hailed “best podcast ever” by host Jon Jordan himself, this week’s deep-dive interview is a real pleasure. Proof of Play CEO Amitt Mahajan (ex-FarmVille) talks about the first year of building what is no doubt one of the best blockchain games currently live, Pirate Nation, his day-to-day priorities, and wider vision of facilitating tech to enhance fully onchain games.

Sky Mavis announced it’s removing free gas fees for Ronin transactions, instead suggesting that game developers themselves sponsor gas costs for its own users. This is facilitated via Ronin’s new wallet onboarding solution Waypoint. As we point out however, this is a significant and inevitable change for Sky Mavis, but the end-user probably won’t notice a big difference.

Finally, TON, TON, and more TON. In fact, 385 games are currently listed on TON, which is a 320% increase in gaming titles during Q3 2024. One token that’s benefitted from this growth is TON itself, but not many others. Hamster Kombat, Catizen, and WatBird may generate clicks, but that seems to be all.

Interesting to see whether the currently ongoing hackathon GameOn TON will change this narrative. Backed by $4 million from TON Foundation, AEON, Alibaba, and Gate.io, it’s currently open for registrations until 14th November.

Additional news

27th September

Just the mention of social platform Telegram sparks reactions so we kick off this week’s roundup discussion by comparing Line Next’s latest initiative with Telegram. More particularly, Line Next has announced a new platform for web3 mini-games, which will be accessible directly via Line’s messenger app. Blacked by a hefty $140 million, Line Next hopes this will drive web3 adoption as well as contribute to more developers opting for its $10 million developer program and SDK.

Ronin-based Ragnarok: Monster World has, as Jon calls it “gotten on with it and actually released something”, as opposed to the many web3 games out there still awaiting perfection both in terms of timing and quality. Currently in soft launch, the official global launch is taking place 1st October. Aiming to ride on its OG status and engage all sorts of players, the developer announced this week that there won’t be any leaderboard perks for NFT holders. Instead they will be offered a reward multiplier for successful gameplay.

In more Ronin-related news, Sky Mavis announced Axie Pals, a Tamagotchi-style and future AI-driven Google Chrome extension, which essentially lets Axie holders turn their beloved Axies into interactive gen-AI-pets.

This week, The Sandbox announced its forthcoming release of Alpha Season 4, which is set for 9th October. As one of the most prominent and well-funded web3 projects in the space, Jon politely asks why it’s taken the developer so long to even get here, and why not further? Are they perhaps waiting for that perfect moment? Or are they just holding off until the metaverse’s mobile launch?

While TreasureDAO has finally voted to leave Arbitrum in favour of ZKsync, Japanese gaming network Oasys has joined forces with Arbitrum to power its L2’s with the integration of Arbitrum Orbit. But as interesting and sometimes puzzling as all these migrations and collaborations between ecosystems may seem to the more nerdy journalists *ahem*, the question arises: does it actually matter to the end-product?

Additional news

20th September

As we prepare for fall, two newish oldish games have been announced. 

  • Addictive mobile game Flappy Bird, first released in 2013, is making a comeback in the form of a Telegram mini-game, now published by Notcoin. The game has launched with season one of its Flap-a-TON event on the TON blockchain, which allows players to join a free minting event for the game’s FLAPPY token.
  • Building on the success of Zynga’s Zynga Poker, ex-Zynga web3 team D20 unveiled social casino game Royal Nutz Poker Club this week. The game will contain leaderboards, including prizes provided through sponsored tournaments. Launching on Base, it will support both mobile and browser.

Sky Mavis keeps its momentum high announcing RPG life sim Tatsumeeko is coming to Ronin. Initially it was built on Solana. Expanding further, Ronin also unveiled the first 7 games granted a place in its early access program Ronin Forge. With many of these also being classic Asian-style RPGs including monster-collecting and other social features, the question is, would it be better to focus more on fewer games, or expand into a wider set of genres?

Speaking of new games, Parallel Studios has announced it’s working on a third web3 title. Co-developed with yet unknown third-party studio, Tau Ceti is a third-person shooter based on the characters from Parallel’s flagship TCG. Launching on Base’s L3 chain B3, it will also be powered by Parallel’s ecosystem token PRIME. The team is also working on Solana-based AI-driven Colony, which is expected to launch in 2025.

One year on from its NFL Rivals in-app marketplace launch, Mythical Games has released some numbers on its impact on monetization. These show a 45% increase in NFT trading volume, with more players also funnelled to its web-based marketplace.

Cross-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden and Animoca Brands’ Mocaverse have announced plans to co-launch a new NFT launchpad exclusively to the Moca Network.

And on that note, our blockchain gaming Mavens, including PLAY CEO Christina Macedo, Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung, HyperPlay co-founder Jacob-eth, and many others, take to the hot topic of NFTs and their future place in games.

Additional content

13th September

For obvious reasons, the stand-out news of the week is CCP Games unveiling more of its blockchain-enabled game now officially named EVE Frontier.

A space MMORPG, the game is open sourced and will operate within CCP’s long-standing PC-based EVE Online universe. Described as a “crowd-built” and “player-driven sandbox”, more of its blockchain-enabled features were released in the game’s whitepaper this week. It also announced the next playtest is taking place on 27th September.

As for web3 game launches, the pace has picked up. Studio 369 has released MetalCore open beta via Epic Games Store and upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, and Yuga Labs and Faraway’s co-developed Dookey Dash: Unclogged has launched with a $1 million prize tournament via app stores. Last but not least, Planetarium’s Immutable-based Immortal Rising 2 has launched, also via mobile app stores.

This week Immutable’s mobile-based squad RPG Guild of Guardians hit 1 million downloads.

Continuing on a positive note, Gala Games’ bizarre lawsuit against Spider Tanks-developer Gamedia has been dismissed. There’s a lot to dive into for the curious, but let’s just hope this means the end of the difficulties the team has been facing due to its collaboration with Gala.

Web3 game ecosystem Super Champs announced its L3 Super Champs Chain, which uses the Arbitrum rollup stack to write its data to Coinbase’s OP-based L2 Base. With its Super Champs hub app and Racket Rampage and Bullet League mobile games reportedly accounting for 10% of all transactions on Base, the Super Champs Protocol Foundation reckons that when the Super Champs Chain launches, it will be a top 5 blockchain in terms of gaming activity.

Sky Mavis is marking Axie’s 2nd birthday with an exclusive rewards campaign, and has kicked off season 10. More generally, Axie’s daily player base remains steady over 80,000 since launching its rebooted rewards program in April, offering daily rewards for logins etc. As seen with other web3 games heavily relying on drawing a crowd with generous rewards campaigns however, it’s crucial to ask (again and again!) if this is sustainable in the longer term. Either way, happy birthday Axie Origins!

Although not many details have been revealed yet, a partnership between French game publisher Gameloft and Solana-launched NFT collection Claynosaurz, unveiled the two are working on a mobile game based on the clay dinos. 

In terms of funding, Hong Kong-based developer Nytro Labs has announced it’s raised $8 million for its forthcoming mobile 4X RPG Castile, which has entered open beta testing on the Aptos blockchain. The round was led by SevenX and OKX Ventures.

Finally, whatever happened to Grapes? We’re not sure, but apparently it’s been bought out by “an unknown investor”. We await more details with interest.

Additional news

6th September

Depending on which narrative you’re feeding, as with most news, the announcement of Sugartown being bought out of Zynga can be seen in two ways.

In case you don’t believe very strongly in blockchain’s impact on games, you might even dislike the sound of it, your focus is probably that Zynga is abandoning web3. And in part that’s accurate. 

However, the good news, if you do have hope for the future of blockchain games, because Sugartown has been bought, it can now carry on and become the fully fledged web3 game platform it always intended to be.

Under new company D20 Labs, Sugartown will still be led by ex-Zynga web3 project leader Matt Wolf and some of his team mates. Indeed, following the acquisition they also launched season 1. That’s more than the project has managed during most of 2024.

Mysten Labs launched pre-orders for its $600 Steamdeck-equivalent web3 native PC gaming handheld this week. Strengthening its focus on games, this follows on from last week’s news of Animoca/Blowfish/Big Kid Studios in-stealth-developed medieval dark-fantasy brawler Darktimes, and Gumi’s Brave Frontier Versus both coming to Sui.

US-developer Faraway Games is expanding its innovative strategy of integrating ex-Yuga IP into existing web2 games. In addition to Shatterline, it announced it’s bringing mobile battle royale Villains from South Korean developer Birdletter to web3. Notably, the start of this will be the integration of the Legends of the Mara and HV-MTL assets.

However, it seems Faraway isn’t busy enough but also unveiled a new game this week, mobile-based action RTS Rebel Skies, which will also support its HV-MTLs. Furthermore, in collaboration with Yuga Labs, the studio is also launching Dookey Dash: Unclogged with a $1 million prize tournament on 12th September. 

Still somewhat a mystery, what Dapper Labs is doing with OG crypto breeding game CryptoKitties and its newly revealed eggs collection has certainly sparked interest. To further the hype, it’s launched Telegram-based mini-game All The Zen, of which we don’t yet know much. 

And while talking of Telegram, BlockchainGamer is trying out a new format for a feature based on various web3 game community voices. You’re welcome to share your opinion on various hot topics as we’ll post them regularly on our Telegram app. We’ll then compile the contributions into a feature, similar to our monthly Mavens article. Head over to our Telegram group to discover the first topic up for discussion and how to participate.

Blockchain MMO UGC platform Scape announced it minted out its 5,000-strong Founding Citizens NFT collection. This caused Jon to look further into this new project from Swedish developer Ringtail Interactive.

Finally, Jon has been talking to Stoneblade Entertainment CEO Justin Gary about Solana-based deck-builder SolForge Fusion and its use of algorithmically generated deck NFTs. Definitely worth a read or listen via your preferred podcast provider.

Additional news

30th August

There are tokens – and there are tokens.

While some might say that Telegram clicker game Hamster Kombat announcing its token launch (26th September) on one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges (OKX) should top the headlines, an alternative narrative is also taking shape.

As those more simplistic mini-games with crypto rewards as their sole focus grow in numbers as quickly as other disappear, games with deeper and more intentional blockchain economies seem to become fewer, but more mature. This tends to make them both better and more interesting.

Three of those games made news this week, with

  • Mythical Games’ mobile football game – and the first NFL-licensed web3 game – NFL Rivals, becoming Kansas City Chiefs’ official mobile game for the forthcoming season.
  • Fully onchain game studio Proof of Play, helmed by ex-Farmville Amitt Mahajan, announced a second blockchain called Boss Chain, as part of its deeper multichain vision. More directly, the chain will facilitate Pirate Nation’s growing operations both in terms of users and transactions. In June, Proof of Play launched its PIRATE token alongside Proof-of-Play points, as part of its long-term staking system.
  • Blocklords also unveiled more details about its points system as part of a staking campaign for its LRDS token, ahead of the Lordchain mainnet launch on Base.

While some games have announced they’re cancelling ops – most recently Treasure-based Tales of Elleria – new games are also being unveiled. Two of them have forthcoming launches on Mysten Labs’ Sui blockchain. First is Darktimes from Animoca Brands’ game studio Blowfish. Described as a multiplayer brawler royale inspired by Nordic medieval dark-fantasy, it’s been built in stealth for a couple of years according to the developer.

The other title is Brave Frontier Versus from Japanese game developer Gumi. Building on the company’s web2 IP Brave Frontiers, the game is expected to launch sometime in 2025.

Going through and making sense of South Korea gaming giant Nexon’s tokenomics for MapleStory Universe, unveiled this week in the shape of a web comic, is no easy task. Jon’s tried his best and he’s ready to tell you what he’s most excited about. 

In regards to funding news, the month of August has been quiet, but the pace has picked up towards the end. This week

  • Web3 game developer Gameplay Galaxy announced it’s raised $11.2 million in an extension round for mobile-based web3 sports game Trial Xtreme Freedom. Prior investments in the round was $12.7 million back in 2022, taking the total funding to $24 million.
  • Japanese blockchain developer Double Jump Tokyo announced a $10 million Series D round. Notably, it was led by Japanese SBI Investment with participation from Sony. Not all earmarked for gaming, some of the funding will go towards working with Sony on its recently-announced Soneium blockchain. As for games, Double Jump is looking to launch TCG Battle of Three Kingdoms, which is based on Sega’s Sangokushi Taisen IP, on Oasys later in 2024.
  • Finally, Hong Kong-based game dev Mugen has raised $4 million in seed funding for mobile RPG/card game Legend of Arcadia.

Additional news

23rd August

TON’s growing momentum reached a new milestone with the introduction of TON Ventures and its $40 million ecosystem fund. At the start of this week, mobile gaming platform Gamee announced it raised an undisclosed investment from the fund for its WAT protocol. On the heels of that, the company announced additional funding from Pantera Capital later in the week. 

Speaking of TON, we recently gathered our blockchain game Mavens panel for a discussion about the sustainability of the current growth of games on TON. Lots of divided yet insightful opinions as ever.

Not the first, and it won’t be the last. Already predicted by some, Mino Games’ CEO Sash MacKinnon announced this week via X that roguelike deck-builder Dimensionals is dropping all web3 features to become a pure web2 game. Raising $15 million for its blockchain plans in 2023, the response to the news has not been positive, with some even calling it a “slow rug”. 

A sign of the still of summer perhaps – how recently Nexus Interactive raised $2 million in funding is not clear, but the announcement made headlines anyhow due to the imminent launch of the company’s NXI token. In addition, its flagship TCG Everdawn Champions – ex-Aradena Battlegrounds – is due to launch in September 2024.

As part of its returning Multiverse Summit at Gamescom this year, Saga unveiled three new games are coming to its ecosystem. One of them is previously announced Solana-based RPG Angelic: The Chaos Theatre. The other two are cross-platform space-themed MMO battle royale Lussa: The Final Frontier and open world third-person RPG God’s Legacy. If anything, the latter certainly emphasises Saga’s focus on publishing games that are quirky, bold, and not for the faint-hearted. Could this shake-up be what the industry needs?

Finally, we discuss Jon’s recent interview with MetaKing Studios CEO David Johansson. In an enthusiastic conversation they dive into the conception of fully onchain idle RPG Dynasty, its problem with bots, and the long-term vision for deeper medieval strategy game Blocklords, including the permadeath of NFT heroes, the LRDS token, and the ability to create long term metagame with family lineage. Johansson also talks about the function of Base L3 Lordchain. Make sure you don’t miss this one, it’s well worth a listen/read.

For the record, Johansson last appeared on Jon’s podcast in November 2023, which provides an equally interesting deep-dive into the future plans for Blocklords.

16th August

This week, Off The Grid from German developer Gunzilla Games completed its first playtest on console. Initially announced for Xbox, the opening test was on PlayStation 5. While no official launch date has yet been announced, Off The Grid appears to become the first blockchain game to launch on console. It’ll also be available on PC.

Two years after its original DigiDaigaku NFT mint, web3 gaming company Limit Break, led by ex-Machine Zone CEO Gabe Leydon, has posted an anniversary update. 

Since its foundation, Limit Break claims its onchain royalty standard ERC721C has been adopted by 75% of new NFT collections with over 97,000 collections and 110 million NFTs using it. Notably, it’s also ensured over $8 million of creator royalties have been paid to creators in the past six months.

Currently it’s working on upgrading its Payment Processor V3 with ERC20C support and an associated ERC20C token launcher, as well as its much anticipated DigiDaigaku mobile game. 

Three months into its live operations cycle, Immutable’s mobile squad RPG Guild of Guardians mixes up the meta with legendary centaur guardian Jadey. We discuss the state of the game, and what impact new NFTs might have in terms of player activity, and more.

With Cosmic Royale’s beta now live for the Mocaverse community, we’ve been checking in with Eden Games (Gear.Club, Test Drive Unlimited and V-Rally) co-founder David Nadal to learn more about the studio’s first web3 native game and why he thinks racing games and blockchain are an ideal match.

As we’ve been doing our monthly updates on the most popular blockchain games in terms of daily active user wallets, the subject of bots has become inevitable. This was further highlighted at the start of the week as Blocklords’ fully onchain companion game Blocklords Dynasty finished its airdrop campaign, resulting in an 80% drop in DAUWs.

A similar decrease was noted when Pixels updated its rewards structure in June, as well as Splinterlands and Alien Worlds if we look further back in time.

Pixels remains transparent in its active attempts to reduce bot activity, and is working to change taskboard tasks as well as introduce taskboard segmentation, which will tailor PIXEL rewards based on player behaviour.

On a similar note, in conjunction with announcing it’s renaming its gaming L3 from Gotchichain to Geist this week, web3 game developer Pixelcraft is adopting a members-only approach to its rewards system.

Additional news

8th August

No price crashes, upcoming elections causing market unpredictability, or wars. Doesn’t sound quite right? Because it isn’t. Despite the data, some researchers insist that the web3 gaming market – and investments therein – is thriving like never before, showing a continual upward trend.

Contrary to this narrative, Jon’s daily tracking of web3 game investments reveals that July 2024 saw $38 million in funding, marking the second-lowest monthly amount recorded in the past 3.5 years. Only August 2023 was lower at $20 million. 

Year-to-date, $658 million has been invested in the sector, a 33% decline from the $981 million announced during the same period in 2023.

Are there any positive takeaways? Well…

  • The current state of web3 gaming indicates it’s no longer an overhyped bubble, but rather aligns more closely with overall market sentiment. This could be a sign of maturation and stability in the sector.
  • The investment scale of 2022 was never sustainable, nor did it result in better games. A funding shortage often leads to more efficient company structures and game development.
  • This phase will pass. Investments will rise again, at least moderately.

As for news this week, we’ve looked at the most popular blockchain games for July in terms of daily active user wallets, showing Pixels in top, with Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain, Telegram clicker game Catizen and newcomer Blocklords Dynasty also exceeding 100,000 daily active wallets.

On the note of Telegram games, Jon has been talking to Gamee chairman Bozena Rezab, who launched mini-games on the platform back in 2016. She shares some great insights into the development of Telegram gaming, numbers of actual players vs bots, and why the mass adoption of web3 is likely to come from games integrating on TON/Telegram.

More Ubisoft news unveiled this week in the shape of player-led Rayman-fronted dystopia Captain Laserhawk: the G.A.M.E., which is set to launch on Arbitrum and be supported by Sequence tech.

Additional news

Also check out our recent compilation of the top Nordic web3 game developers, ahead of PG Connects’ return to Helsinki on 1st-2nd October, which also features the exciting debut of our Big Screen Gaming Summit.

2nd August

Much of the discussion of this week’s roundup podcast revolved around bots. In part this is because some projects have been posted high level of growth, with Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain breaking two million daily active unique wallets for the first time.

However, breaking down the numbers, we can see that this audience roughly breaks down to a third from Pixels – a game we know has >50% – social farming platform Carv, and game Lumiterra, which isn’t yet live but has just started a points engagement program.

So while Ronin definitely has hit over 2 million DAUWs, the question of how many of those wallets are bots and how sustainable this activity will be are both significant questions to answer.

One game that has been forced to become more proactive when it comes to bots is fully onchain game Pirate Nation, which has stopped new signups as well as introduced a queuing system, such is the demand to get into its Bounty Season 2 program. It’s also building out a new blockchain to try and improve the situation.

Finally, another fully onchain game Blocklords Dynasty has hit one million lifetime unique wallets this week. How many are bots? We don’t know but it will be a lot as the game is effectively an airdrop campaign for the game’s LRDS token.

Additional news

26th July

Last week we posed the question how to build good blockchain games. Unsurprisingly, we still don’t know, but it seems two camps of web3 games are becoming increasingly cemented, and both offer significantly different answers – neither right nor wrong.

So, the Telegram mini-game trend has seen more additions this week in the form of Delabs Games’ recently launched Giga Chad Bat, crypto exchange OKX’s OKX Racer, Animoca Brands’ TOWER ecosystem game Crazy Rush Heroes, and Spielworks’ Chainmonsters companion app Tapmonsters.

Currently, the number of games listed on TON is 222.

On the other hand – let’s call them deeper and more blockchain-y – games such as MetalCore, Hunters On-Chain, and Blocklords have announced or released new features aimed at immersing players ever more into their web3 ecosystem functions. 

To that end, Studio 369 unveiled idle mech battler MetalCore Arena, which serves as a companion game to its PC mech battler MetalCore. The team also sold out four of its five vehicle NFT mints, which were only available on Immutible’s zkEVM chain and paid for using MetalCore’s MCG token.

As for Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain it introduced a new reward system as part of its ongoing play-to-airdrop campaign, alongside ending season 1. In short, it means players will earn BOOM tokens in the form of bundled ERC1155 NFTs called BOOM Bags.

Blocklords’ LRDS token went live on exchanges this week in conjunction with the developer introducing a new node reward program. Although the token has had utility within the PC-based strategy game for most of 2024, LRDS recently expanded its functions with the launch of Blocklords’ fully onchain companion game Blocklords Dynasty, which runs on Base. This, compared to most of Telegram’s tap-games, has got Jon noticeably excited…

In other news, Mythical Games’ NFL Rivals hit $7 million in trading volume, at a slightly slower pace than its previous one million which was reached within a record-fast one month. More significantly, it’s the first time there’s been more players selling NFTs than buying, which could be a good sign that more users are tapping into the game’s web3 features. 

Launched earlier in July, Jenny has also been playing our Game of the Week, Soulkeep, which is a tower defense game closely integrated with the TCG Splinterlands.

Additional news

19th July

How then should we build?

Certainly, making games is no easy undertaking. Making good games is even harder. Add blockchain integration to the recipe, and you’re in for an almost insurmountable challenge. So it’s no surprise that many projects struggle to get sufficient funding or get cancelled.

Another more specific question developers need to ponder is on which blockchain to deploy a game. To this end, we asked our web3 gaming Mavens this week what factors to consider when choosing on which ecosystem to build. While Sequence/Horizon’s Sam Barberie and Immutable’s Robbie Ferguson emphasise the importance of the actual teams and their gaming background, other developers highlight blockchain performance such as transactions speeds and scalability. There’s also some interesting disagreement over network effects and whether onboarding existing gamers within an ecosystem actually works.

A few days later than planned, the Big Blockchain Game Report Q2 2024 was released this week. Taking a more nuanced stance, based on actual numbers, on what’s been going on in the industry the last quarter, it generally shows poor performance compared to Q1’s upward trend. As for gaming tokens, it’s been particularly bad. 

As Jon points out however, as bleak as the market may seem, there are some developers doing things the right way, looking for example at Pirate Nation-developer Proof of Play and the launch of its PIRATE token – up over 200% since launch. 

Another company pushing forward despite headwinds is Immutable, which has now hit over 5 million total user wallets alongside continually expanded its ecosystem. In the first half of 2024 it added 61 games, and 16% of all new games tracked during Q2.

Adopting a different approach is Wemade’s web3 platform Wemix. In contrast to Immutable it’s deliberately cutting back on the quantity of games within its ecosystem in order to prioritize fewer but higher quality games. Clearly a company which is trying to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and isn’t afraid to change direction.

Finally, web3 infrastructure builder Stardust launched its gaming rewards platform Starbase this week – with a series of prominent games such as Shrapnel, Habbo, Cambria, and Serum City launching a total of 25 missions – as a step towards onboarding the next “billion players to web3”. 

Time will tell if it’s that easy.

Additional news

12th July

To answer the question what tokens are good for, Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu published a medium post diving into the broader utility of web3 tokens, and in particular Mocaverse’s MOCA token, which launched this week.

The attentive reader might remember that we recently let our eminent ensemble of web3 gaming mavens discuss crypto tokens, their function in games and how to build long-term utility, which is a great read and adds nuance and helpful perspectives to developers looking to go down that route.

Some exciting funding news was announced this week with Soccerverse raising $3.1 million from Square Enix, taking its total funding to $4 million. Early investor Hiro Capital also participated.

In our discussion, Jon goes more in-depth about the game and explains how it stands out among other fully onchain games, which are typically not:

  • Sports games, nor
  • Deep economic simulators.

Soccerverse is both. It’s also not your typical play-to-earn where you buy an NFT for $50 one week, expecting to cash out $300 the next. Currently in open beta on Polygon, it’s well worth checking out.

Faraway announced the first step in adding new utility to ex-Yuga collection HV-MTL since the developer acquired it in March 2024. This will be done by integrating the HV-MTL mechs with web2 shooter Shatterline from Frag Labs. Currently available on Steam until 1st August, the game will then be taken down until its full official launch in Q4 2024.

Additional news

5th July

Thanks to Mocaverse for sending us new merch as it builds up towards its coming token TGE.

239 million is the latest reported number of players of TON-based tap game Hamster Kombat. Needless to say, it’s by far the biggest web3 game on the market right now. Indeed, Telegram claims that 500 million of its users play games on the platform. TON in question has gone from having 120 games up to 167 in less than two weeks.

Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu is not just guessing wildly when he predicts the next 100 million web3 users will come from Hamster Kombat and similar games such as Animoca’s own Gamee network. But would it be more accurate to say the next 100 million web3 bot players? Inherently these games tend to attract a large number of the latter. 

If our recent data on the number of bots in games like Pixels – accompanied by historical data on bot activity in Splinterlands and Alien Worlds – is anything to go by, we may need to rethink the relevance of DAUW, and perhaps turn our focus to metrics like retention. On this note, due to Pixels’ chapter 2 release in mid-June, the game saw a 69% drop in DAUWs as bots were broken.

Continuing its up momentum, among gaming blockchains, Immutable was the biggest gainer in terms of total new user wallets during June. Up by around 30% to 4 million, its active user wallets also shot up from 180,000 to over 300,000. Ronin also gained around 1 million, up 5%, and remains the largest gaming network by some distance.

This week one of Ronin’s third party games also launched globally; Zillion Whales’ RTS Wild Forest.

Alien Worlds-developer Dacoco has released a generative AI tool, which enables users to create new story content, expanding the original Alien Worlds lore. The initiative is part of the forthcoming Tokenized Lore voting system, which allows the game’s community members to vote on their preferred stories. Creators are further incentivised by rewards and grants, all aligning with Alien Worlds’ community-first model.

Finally, Mighty Bear Games has launched its new platform Goat Gaming, which focuses on skill-based wagering. Currently entailing one live game in the form of its own Mighty Action Heroes, the plan is to integrate hundreds of games, including from third-party developers. With the help of AI, the team will roll out new games every 2-3 weeks. Jon’s had a chat to Mighty Bear CEO Simon Davies who said the plans go much deeper, including the release of viral mini-games on Telegram.

Additional news

28th June

New week, new caps. Thanks to Planet Mojo for sending us new merch ahead of next season Summer Surge, starting 11th July. Go check it out folks.

By no coincidence, Immutable has dominated the web3 gaming narrative this week as it continues to grow both in terms of active users, and games launching and picking up activity on its zkEVM rollup.

Despite May’s big game launch being mobile-based idle squad battler Guild of Guardians, it doesn’t seem to be the main factor driving the growth. Instead, Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain, which is joining Immutable from Polygon, has seen 20,000 active wallets with its 250 million BOOM token play-to-airdrop campaign currently in full swing. Immutable now also lets players earn additional game rewards and gems via its Passport service. 

Another title on the network, Shardbound, launched open beta via Epic games Store this week, although no blockchain is currently live in the game. Mech shooter MetalCore kicked off its closed beta playtesting alongside minting its MCG token, which can be used to enhance the game experience through upgrading NFT mechs and units, and more. In addition, we’ve highlighted the forthcoming launch of open world blockchain game series Illuvium, which goes live 25th July via Epic Games Store.

All together this has taken active user wallets on Immutable to over 300,000, and total lifetime wallets to over 3 million.

To top it off, the company also announced it has partnered with South Korean game developer Netmarble to integrate the Marblex gaming series – including Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds, A3: Still Alive and Meta World: My City – to its platform.

Continuing on the two extremes of web3 gaming’s inevitability or death, we spoke to one of the industry’s early pioneers, Sky Mavis’ co-founder Jeff Zirlin, about the current state of blockchain gaming at large, and gaming on Ronin in particular. Is Sky Mavis relying too heavily on past successes, what’s Ronin without Pixels, and isn’t it time to dump Axie Infinity to let the Axie IP evolve into something else? Dive into the full interview here.

And talking of Pixels, we’ve also had a chat to its CMO Heidi Christine on the challenging task of pleasing the largest web3 gaming community while simultaneously trying to perfect a play-to-earn game as well as erase bot-activity. She shares some good and insightful points that would benefit many game developers to learn from.

Notably, following the major update in chapter 2 released last week, Pixels has dropped from its over 1 million DAUW peak in May to just over 370,000. Most likely, and similarly to Splinterlands and Alien Worlds, this is due to a decrease in bots, which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing.

Additional news

21st June

In this month’s Mavens feature, our great panel of bright minds – including Animoca CEO Robby Yung, Dacoco CEO Saro McKenna, Game7 co-founder Jon Allen, and Saga CEO Rebecca Liao, and many more – joined in the discussion on DAOs. More precisely, we asked whether it’s a dying trend or still has some life in it due to newcomers such as The Sandbox DAO etc. It turned into a great deep-dive about the value of community, democracy, and the challenge of trying to structure decentralization.

We looked at Skrice Studios’ new blockchain features rolling out for mobile strategy game Heroes of Mavia. Four months following the game’s launch, downloads are still going up although nowhere near the initial pace, but its daily players are falling off at a faster rate. Will phase 2 spark new life into the game?

With 158 million wallets recently reported – although most likely not unique users – Hamster Kombat has shot off and become the biggest Telegram-based tap-to-earn game. Alongside other meme-coin-y Telegram games on the TON blockchain, we wonder, has the mass adoption of blockchain games already started?

Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain launched its BOOM token airdrop campaign. The month long play-to-airdrop event will see 250 million BOOM tokens distributed alongside Hunters On-Chain going live on Immutable zkEVM.

To say that L2 chains, subnets, chainlets, supernets, L3s, rollups, you name it, are trending is an understatement. Jon likens the amount of web3 infrastructure currently being built with the over-satiating UK railway building boom of the 1840’s. This leaves us with a significant question; where are the players? Is build-to-build the most accurate description of the web3 gaming industry?

And on this note;

  • Sky Mavis announced its forthcoming support for zkEVM L2 chains. Using a modified version of the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK), third-party game developers will be able to build their own L2 blockchains on Ronin, with start sometime in 2025.
  •  Japanese gaming Konami unveiled a partnership with Avalanche-builder Ava Labs, which will see the former build a subnet on the Avalanche blockchain. Called Resella, the new blockchain is described as an NFT-solution for web2 and web3 developers looking to adopt blockchain technology for their apps.
  • Jon’s podcast this week featured Saga CEO Rebecca Liao, who expanded on the purpose of L1 blockchain Saga serving as a layer for other L1s. The company aims to encourage game developers to build their own blockchains at the cost of $500 a month, hoping it will lead to at least 100 games launching before the end of 2024.

Additional news

14th June

Two opposing memes have flourished in blockchain gaming circles this week. One claims that web3 gaming is dead, while the other, started by Sam Steffanina, thinks web3 gaming is inevitable.

So what’s the story?

Firstly, let’s let the more substantial part of the industry speak for itself. Three of the currently most successful games in the blockchain gaming space each made waves this week.

Mythical Games’ NFL Rivals broke $6 million in NFT trading volume and, more significantly, hit $1 million monthly trading volume for the first time. One reason for the recent growth is likely to be the game’s Quick Trades feature. Mythical has also been busy migrating its Mythos Chain over to Polkadot, while reworking its flagship PC game Blankos Block Party for mobile, as well as recently unveiling a collaboration with Pudgy Penguins to launch a mobile party game. 

Proof of Play’s Pirate Nation launched its PIRATE utility token this week. In contrast to the large majority of web3 gaming tokens, PIRATE has gained 170% during its first day since launch. 29,000 wallets have claimed the tokens so far, with an impressive 71% of PIRATE being staked back into the Proof of Play ecosystem. If nothing else, this is proof of early supporters’ belief in the team, whose plans don’t stop at shipping fully onchain social RPG Pirate Nation, but extends to multiple games in addition to its native blockchain infrastructure.

More generally, Pirate Nation has garnered over 120,000 players since launch, and is the biggest fully onchain game on the market. As for Proof of Play, it raised $33 million in 2023, and consists of gaming veterans from Zynga, Epic Games, EA, and Activision.

Lastly, currently and still the most popular blockchain game by miles, Pixels, has geared up towards the rollout of chapter 2, which is more like launching Pixels 2.0, rather than just a new chapter. On the ball as ever, our editor-in-chief Jon Jordan has been talking to game CEO Luke Barwikowski about the forthcoming updates, and why it’s only the beginning for this Ronin-based social RPG.

So, from this point of view, it’d be hard to support the thesis that the sector is dead. 

However, if judging by the price of gaming tokens which has been the product of wild speculation over the last 6 months, and many of the games hailed more for their potential of earning crypto than being enjoyable games, then yes, one could possibly argue that the market is in the pit.

But even so, looking at Animoca Brands’ web3 gaming network Gamee and the growth of its current Telegram initiative Wat Protokol, it’s hard to agree. As ever, the truth is not in the eye of the beholder, it just depends which metrics you choose to look at.

Additional news

7th June

Three weeks ago, we dismantled the preposterous claim that $988 million had been invested into web3 gaming in April 2024. We wrote, “Out of the $988 million, $600 million is from a16z games fund, which is not web3 specific”, continuing “Similarly, as for the $275 million-strong Bitkraft Ventures games fund, it’s aimed at “gaming and interactive media companies”.”

Now of course we don’t expect that every industry pr or journalist reads this weekly roundup, but it’s astonishing to see that the “nearly $1 billion of funding” claim is still flourishing out there as a sign of the health of the entire web3 gaming industry.

Why even point this out, you might ask. Well, it doesn’t build trust in the industry reputation to rely on false numbers for starters. The state of the industry should only be assessed based on reliable and relevant data. Secondly, when a fairly substantial investment round actually is announced, it will seem rather futile in relation to the overblown “April 2024 funding” number, and thwart any attempts at analysing market trends well.

On that note, let’s unpick this week’s most prominent funding news of $20 million into UGC-platform The Sandbox. Led by Animoca Brands, of which The Sandbox is a subsidiary, and Kingsway Capital, the funding was raised using convertible promissory notes with a $1 billion valuation cap. The noteholders have the ability to convert into equity of Bacasable Global Limited (the company that operates The Sandbox) at the same terms as existing preference shares.

For nuance, according to a Bloomberg report from April 2022, The Sandbox was then aiming to raise up to $400 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation, and its previous announced funding was a $93 million Series B at a pre-round valuation of $500 million in November 2021, so the current $1 billion cap on these notes underlines the difficult state of the sector, even for its top companies.

In other news, fully onchain turn-based RPG Pirate Nation from US-studio Proof of Play has announced its PIRATE token launch is taking place 13th June. PIRATE will be used to buy the game’s gem hard currency, with which players can purchase battlepasses, speed up timers, and more. Additional utility include the ability to craft and stake, which will be rewarded with PoP points.

Another developer building momentum and token utility is Boomland. Recently launching its Hunters On-Chain 250 million BOOM play-to-airdrop event – with emphasis on play – the team has now announced two more web3 games as part of its ecosystem. Its existing web2 mobile games Archery Club and Car Driving School are both set to gradually implement web3 through a soft tokenization process. All titles will deploy on Immutable zkEVM.

Chris Heatherly-led web3 game studio Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow has announced its social deduction game The Mystery Society is also joining Immutable, having previously been on Polygon. It hopes that Immutable “will be giving The Mystery Society a big push over the coming months”. 

Lastly, following on from breaking the 20 million-mark in terms of active user wallets earlier this week, Ronin has launched an early access program. Called Ronin Forge, it will grant emerging innovative web3 gaming studios $50,000 and technical support. Six teams will regularly be admitted to the program, with successful candidates having an opportunity to get additional funding, support and become a Sky Mavis partner developer.

Additional news

31st May

Continuing the Gala Games narrative from last week, this week Gamedia revealed more dirty laundry on its partnership with the game publisher. 

In an official statement from Dutch game developer Gamedia, which is the maker of tank brawler Spider Tanks and other titles, the team revealed a deteriorating collaboration tainted by unfulfilled promises, failed revenue payments, unwillingness to cooperate, also using the terms “greed” and “evil”.

To what extent this and similar revelations will impact the Gala ecosystem remains to be seen, but at this stage it’s obvious that the industry is better off without companies such as Gala.

Another week, and two new games. First out it’s Mojo Melee-developer Mystic Moose revealing its third title, squad RPG Prophecy of the Ancients (working name). The other title to be unveiled is Mythical Games and Pudgy Penguins “mobile icy party game” based on the Pudgy Penguins IP, expected to launch in 2025.

In other news, Grease Monkey Games announced its Torque Drift 2 expansion, including an integration with the Motorverse ecosystem and the addition of new licensed cars such as Honda and Toyota.

In our latest interview, we talk to Cosmicrafts CEO Omar Hernandez about its fully onchain cross-platform RTS launching imminently on ICP.

Additionally

24th May

Following a weekend where recently launched idle RPG Guild of Guardians ran hot on our mobiles, we started the week with a Mavens discussion about social farming, and its impact on building community.

Before Gala Games changed the tone – with Gala president of blockchain Jason Brink dropping the news he was resigning from the company, although reassuring that he will remain as a Gala advisor, to set up a new entity. Brink, and the group following him, have the noble purpose to support the Gala ecosystem in a more decentralized manner. All good so far.

Moving on to Tuesday 21st May, coincidentally Gala was exploited with the unauthorized minting of 5 billion GALA tokens, worth $240 million – highlighting exactly the security issues Brink and co were pointing out needed to be addressed.

In an even more surprising turn of events, the following day the attacker returned some of the stolen funds he had converted to ETH, which Gala CEO Eric Schiermeyer said would “probably” be bought and burned on galaswap.

Obviously none of these events have officially been linked to the dirty laundry unveiled in the company in 2023, when Gala forked its GALA token to reissue it as GALA v2, followed by burning 42% of the new tokens. Although stating that this was done to enhance the security, it later transpired that the fork and burn was a way to render the $130 million worth of GALA tokens, which Gala co-founder and CEO Schiermeyer accused co-founder Wright Thurston of stealing, worthless.

As for the impact on GALA, the initial news caused a 19% price drop, but then DWF Labs – a market maker with a reputation for wash trading, and also a Gala investor – stepped in and bought 28 million tokens “to alleviate market pressure”. The price is now up 21% from the low and at an ATH for May…

The week continued in a more traditional manner with Aurory launching Citrine, its biggest update yet for Seekers of Tokane.

We spoke to Studio 369 director of marketing Hanny Duong about MetalCore’s recent playtests, its forthcoming MCG token launch, future expansion plans, and more.

PC extraction shooter Shrapnel kicked off its third playtest STX3, including new features such as craftable weapon skins, mission-based SHRAP rewards, and a new staking system.

Immutable announced its hit 1 million sign-ups to Immutable Passport, which is now close to 1.4 million. The traffic seems to primarily be driven by Boomland joining the ecosystem and increasing users with its Hunters On-Chain pre-launch activities.

Find Satoshi Lab unveiled its third title – Stepn Go – which is a revamped version of the initial move-to-earn mobile game with additional social features such as NFT lending.

Additional news

17th May

Taking centre stage this week is Immutable’s Guild of Guardians with its global launch on iOS and Android. Jon’s not only been head down playing the game and making some helpful videos along the way, but also checked in with game director Chris Clay to get his view on the game launch, how it’s been received so far, its NFT creation, and the team’s strategy moving into the liveops stage.

Not surprisingly, our biggest story was also from earlier in the week when Guild of Guardians became the top-traded gaming NFT collection across all blockchains.

In other news, the most popular blockchain game Pixels broke 1 million daily active users on 13th May – although the number has since decreased to 725,000. Axie Infinity still holds the record of 1.1 million DAUWs.

Hitting another milestone this week, Mythical Games’ NFL Rivals reached $5 million in NFT trading volume. Of course a range of factors would contribute to this, but the most obvious one seems to be the game’s recently introduced quick swap feature, which lets users store up multiple unwanted NFTs in their inventory until they reach the amount required to swap them with an NFT player they do want. Since this integration, NFL Rivals’ trading volume has accelerated notably.

Continuing on the theme of data… DappRadar has released its April 2024 industry report, and squeezed out some eye-watering headlines, claiming that $988 million was invested into web3 gaming in April 2024 alone. The only problem is, the funding is not only related to web3 gaming, indeed it might only be a minority of the funding on which DappRadar bases the number.

But before we look into the details, let’s look at why we even bother pointing this out? It’s not to discredit DappRadar or Blockchain Game Alliance who backs the report, of course, but because throwing out exaggerated numbers does no one a favour. Certainly not an industry which is already tainted by lack of trust and transparency – foundational values which the web3 gaming industry should promote more of, not less.

Firstly, out of the $988 million, $600 million is from a16z games fund, which is not web3 specific. It might be years before we know the numerous games and projects this fund actually invested in. This leads us onto the next problem. As game studios regularly announce funding rounds, these will in some part contain money from game funds such as a16z’s, but the exact amount is not disclosed. Instead, this gets counted as new funding into web3 gaming, and hence, inaccurately, gets counted twice. 

Similarly, as for the $275 million-strong Bitkraft Ventures games fund, it’s aimed at “gaming and interactive media companies”. That’s $875 million out of the $988 million.

Perhaps even more astonishing however is the numbers reporting on which games are currently leading in web3. DappRadar is a great data source which we regularly use to track daily and monthly active user wallets in games, so it’s odd to see how the data in the report is so wildly misrepresentative.

It claims that Pixels, which we mentioned above with its 1 million DAUWs, has over 20 million monthly active wallets. How does DappRadar add up to this number? By accumulating the same daily active users every day for a month, it seems, which is nothing like unique MAUWs. 

Additional news

10th May

Amid token airdrops, meme games, and community farming, it’s good to refill our motivation tank by going back to the fundamentals of decentralization. With the upcoming playtest of Project Awakening, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson does just that in a recent interview where he talks about real use cases of blockchain in gaming. Veigar Pétursson says, “There’s so much development that takes place around EVE Online, which is not orchestrated by us, and we don’t really provide extremely good tools to do it. They’re okay, but they could be better. Blockchains are very good at organising distributed development.”

More significantly however, he adds, “We aim for everything around EVE Online to go on forever (…) Blockchain is a good way to store value in a very anti-fragile way.”

Similarly, in another interview this week we spoke to mobile game publisher TapNation about the utility of web3 in mobile games such as Monster Squad Rush and Giant Rush. 

While it’s increasingly clear that game developers can’t remain successful at status quo and hope the market sorts itself out, TapNation Head of web3 Philippe Lenormand argues that staying on top of new innovation is key, pointing out particularly how “Web3 opens up new revenue streams, allowing us to diversify our value creation”. 

It’s that simple. Finding new ways to create value is fundamental to a functional market economy, and letting players themselves have agency over the value generation, is exactly what Stone Blade’s founder Justin Gary also spoke about in regards to the implementation of blockchain in mobile TCG SolForge Fusion, while emphasising how it enables “true digital ownership, much like physical card collecting, but with the added convenience of easy trading and management”.

And speaking of market changes, Jon had a great podcast conversation with Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon – who was instrumental in the early growth of guilds in 2021 – and its recent investor Shi Kai WEI from LongHash, about the evolving role and future prospect of guilds in the industry.

In other news this week we looked at the 127 blockchain games now listed on Epic Games Store, including newly listed sandbox RPG DECIMATED from Fracture Labs.

Ahead of its STX3 playtest, FPS extraction shooter Shrapnel announced it’s integrated a new feature that enables players to get SHRAP tokens directly via its website instead of purchasing through an exchange.

When it comes to the most popular blockchain games in terms of onchain activity, the only game in town is currently Ronin-based Pixels, breaking 800,000 daily active unique wallets during April.

In closing, we also talk about our excitement of next week’s launch of idle RPG Guild of Guardians, which is a 14-month long work of Chris Clay and his Immutable team, although the game goes back longer than that.

Additional news

3rd May

Crypto sentiment has changed as we’re now a third through 2024. However, it has been said that volatility creates new opportunities, at least for those who know what they’re doing. To that end, market correction is a healthy thing, as we like to point out, as it sorts the wheat from the chaff, ultimately allowing more room for the former to bear fruit.

Meanwhile, those knowing less well what they’re doing and seemingly lacking a long-term vision are likely to fall off at this point.

In terms of web3 gaming then, investments have taken a new shape too, with numerous rounds of smaller amounts, certainly compared to the hey-days of 2021, but with an increasing number of participating investors. Most notable investment this week was Spanish developer GFAL raising $3.2 million from Supercell and Mitch Lasky for flagship RPG Elemental Raiders and additional games it’s working on.

Swedish-headquartered Patriots Division also raised $5 million for 5v5 hybrid third-person action game Shadow War, while web3 infrastructure companies Holograph raised $3 million, and Style Protocol $2.5 million. 

Animoca Brands and Darewise unveiled new Bitcoin protocol OPAL and its Rune token BLIF, which is already integrated in Darewise’s MMOG Play Beyond. As for its broader vision, OPAL aims to become the leading Bitcoin-based web3 ecosystem spanning across gaming, entertainment, defi, and education.

In more Animoca news, Singapore-based Saakuru Labs announced it’s integrating gaming-centric L2 blockchain Saakuru Protocol, which is already leveraged by Japanese gaming blockchain Oasys, in some of Animoca Brands’ portfolio games.

Our interviews contain Jon’s in-depth conversation/podcast with Midnight CEO Steve Wade about the studio’s Evergreen multiverse and its intriguing concept springing from a desire to make “something that was so ridiculously hard and challenging that no-one would pitch it to investors”.

Meanwhile, Jenny has been talking to Playmint CEO David Amor following the fully onchain AA24 hackathon, about his takeaways from the event, Playmint’s own autonomous world Downstream, and why fully onchain games make him go to work each morning.

While speaking of fully onchain games, we also had a great guest column from Dacoco CEO and Alien World’s co-founder Saro McKenna this week, which discusses the illimitable potential of self-governed blockchain worlds. Lastly, Lattice launched its Redstone mainnet, accompanied by the release of a handful of fully onchain games and autonomous worlds.

Additional news

26th April

British economist David Ricardo wrote, “Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them.”

To this end, game developers would do well in thinking about how to attach utility to their initial product in order to create a higher demand for it, rather than launch and give away something which lacks value, only to end up depleting their ecosystem.

William Stanley Jevons was another English economist contributing to the theories of utility. Known for his, then pioneering, view that more efficient energy production leads to more, not less, demand for energy, he stated that “Value depends entirely upon utility”.

Along the same line was French economist Jean-Baptiste Say (Say’s law) with his seemingly straight-forward thesis that “It is production which opens a demand for products”.

Starting a discussion on value, in our case in the context of web3 gaming, tokens, and more generally digital ownership, is worthy of much more than the 10 minutes we devote to it in this week’s roundup. We barely touch the surface. Nonetheless, in our days of token-mania and increasing desperate attempts to build community, it is valuable to revisit the intellectual roots from which this industry is sprung.

For instance, to Ricardo’s point, what’s the quantity of labour required to get hold of some of the digital freebies project’s frequently use to attract new members? And how will holders value those assets?

Dive further into this topic with our panel of blockchain gaming Mavens in this month’s discussion on how tokens can add long-term value beyond initial speculation.

Now to the news of the week. A handful of investment rounds were announced, including InfiniGods raising $8 million to support the expansion of its web3 mobile games. In conjunction with announcing its migration from BNB to Ronin, Puffverse also announced it’s raised $3 million. Web3 gaming company Tevaera announced a $5 million funding round, data layer platform Carv has secured $10 million in a series A round, and chess-with-a-dash-of-magic game Anichess has raised $1.8 million.

Currently with its NFTs on Ethereum, South Korean developer NDUS Interactive announced a partnership with Mysten Labs, which will see its Unreal-built shooter Xociety launch on Sui. Good news not only for Sui, but this could prove a smart move from NDUS too as currently there’s a lack of highly anticipated or successful games on Sui, which might help Xociety stand out, without having to compete with a myriad of other web3 shooters in the same ecosystem, thinks Jon.

Immutable is the latest in line to launch its rewards program, The Main Quest, including a claimed $50 million worth of rewards. More significantly, the initial games announced in the program include Blast Royale, Hunters on Chain, Illuvium, MetalCore, Pixelmon, Pool Masters, Space Nation and Treeverse.

Along the same path is the Mon protocol with its mission program, which launched with partnering game MetalCore to enable players to earn mission points that will eventually be converted into MON tokens. Notably, MetalCore is also running its own quest system during its current closed beta test. This allows players to earn Marks, which will be used to claim MetalCore’s MCG tokens when they go live later in 2024.

And South Korean developer Delabs Games has joined the chorus by kicking off an airdrop campaign for its forthcoming GAME token. Players can either earn points by playing Rumble Racing Star, or by holding an Adventure Pass or Metabolts NFT.

Finally, Pixels is closing in on Axie Infinity’s record 1.1 million daily actives by hitting 870,000 DAUWs this week while also breaking 3 million life-time wallets. More significantly, as Jon points out, Pixels now has over 200,000 VIP members which pay $10 worth of RON every month to play the game. Seems CEO Luke Barwikowski did his homework in economics.

In our deep-dive this week, we interview Freeverse and LAOS Foundation CEO and founder Alun Evans on bridgeless minting, interoperability, and much more.

Additional news

19th April

Not that it’s the only factor, but as the Bitcoin halving is imminently upon us, the narrative in tokenland has certainly changed during this week. A large majority of gaming tokens have taken a plunge, but as we discuss in today’s roundup, this is not an entirely bad thing. Being able to differentiate signal from noise is useful, and helps us to see projects for their utility beyond initial speculation. Notably, not all tokens are hit as badly, with Guild of Guardians’ GOG and Parallel’s PRIME tokens defying the curve and remaining strong performers.

US-based game developer Faraway Games announced the acquisition of Yuga Labs’ IP Legends of the Mara and HV-MTL, while also onboarding Yuga chief gaming officer Spencer Tucker as new chief product officer. The move can be seen as part of Yuga’s general downscaling of gaming in exchange for a bigger focus on its NFT collections. Regarding Faraway, its team consists of numerous gaming veterans which should be well equipped to discern the future of LotM and HV-MTL, starting with a new points system. 

Sky Mavis news keeps rolling out steadily, with the latest announcement that OG web2 gaming IP Ragnarok is entering web3 by launching MMORPG Ragnarok: Monster World on the Ronin blockchain. Developed by Singapore-HQed 0X&, which has licensed the IP from original developer South Korean studio Gravity, the game is set for launch in Q3 2024.

A recurring guest on Jon’s Blockchain Gaming World Podcast, this week The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget was accompanied by CCO Nicola Sebastiani, in a great in-depth conversation about the state of The Sandbox, what to expect from the metaverse in the near future, and how the attitude towards blockchain games has changed since the project’s inception in 2021 – and more.

Funding news of the week comes in the shape of Avalon announcing a $10 million funding round, co-led by Bitkraft Ventures and Hashed, for the studio’s eponymous UGC-focused AI-heavy MMORPG Avalon.

Additional news

12th April

Daffodils and tulips are not the only new addition colouring the seasonal landscape as of late. Plenty of web3 gaming news, particularly surrounding token launches, add a splash of spring as the market is moving ever further away from the crypto winter. 

Sadly though, some studios are still hit hard in the aftermath of it. This week Trailblazer announced it’s sunsetting Solana-based PVP game Eternal Dragons. In conjunction with the news, the team also confirmed it will implement a buyback program for NFT holders. If nothing else, it’s good to see a mature studio showing responsibility and respect to its community, and ultimately the industry, and not exiting with a rug pull.

On a more upbeat note, we’re now into Q2 2024, and a recent industry report from the Big Blockchain Game List shows strong industry growth spanning across funding, gaming tokens and new games revealed. Perhaps the strongest takeaway from the report however, is the different outcomes among projects depending on their long-term strategies. “Projects that can combine playerbase and revenue with an overall vision and the delivery of new features, while wrangling the currents of crypto sentiment and the peculiarities of their own communities, will be the best placed for long term success”, as per the report.

Arguably one of the most prominent games in the industry is PC extraction shooter Shrapnel. This week Jon Jordan had the pleasure of talking to Neon Machine head of studio Don Norbury about how the game is shaping up, its current STX playtests, its broader UGC vision, the strengths of deploying on Avalanche, the prospect of going console, and much more. Dive in!

Lattice dropped more details about its forthcoming Redstone mainnet launch – now slated for 1st May. Based on the Optimism OP stack, Redstone is mainly home to fully onchain games and autonomous worlds, with multiple titles going live alongside the mainnet release.

Ubisoft also teased more details – including gameplay footage – of its tactical turn-based RPG Champions Tactics. Behold, it’s certainly one of the best looking web3 games in the making.

Additional news

22nd March

As the first days of spring approach (in UK) the bees are not the only ones buzzing. Numerous news dropped this week in conjunction with GDC in San Francisco.

But first, Ronin has hit a new all-time high of 1.2 million daily active unique wallets, beating the previous peak of 1.1 million DAUWs from 21st November 2021, which was generated during the height of Axie Infinity. A significant difference is that Ronin’s peak in 2021 immediately dropped, whereas in 2024 the chain’s activity is spread across multiple thirdparty games and native Sky Mavis’ titles, as well as token sales and continuous airdrop events.

Jon has been following the early development and more recent makeover of Immutable’s anticipated mobile squad battler Guild of Guardians. This week an official launch date was announced – 15th May. In addition, Immutable unveiled an onchain crafting system that allows players to burn existing Guild of Guardians NFTs to generate a new series of in-game characters. This is due to begin on Monday 25th March. 

In more Immutable news – and more significant to the games currently building on Immutable’s zkEVM rollup – the company announced a partnership with crypto exchange OKX to launch a GameFi launchpad. Effectively, this means Immutable’s zkEVM and Passport solution will integrate with OKX’s NFT marketplace, and more generally be supported by the OKX ecosystem.

Much anticipated PC extraction shooter Shrapnel announced the launch of its marketplace, alongside three days of STX2 playtesting. Initially, 10 cosmetically-enhanced weapon skins, which can all be used in the STX2 playtest, will be up for sale in the marketplace. 

Best not to ask about Jon’s progression in Sharpnel so far, but it certainly made HyperPlay founder JacobC giggle as the two mentioned it in this week’s podcast interview, which mainly focused on native web3 game distribution platforms. 

Talking of which, in an exclusive interview with BlockchainGamer.biz, Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu shared some valuable insight of his experience of games distribution via centralised app stores too, and why he thinks they need to adopt instead of resist blockchain technology.  

In terms of chain migrations, Pixelcraft announced its forthcoming L3 rollup Gotchichain is moving to Base from previously building on Polygon. Also migrating its game portfolio from Polygon, including mobile title King of Destiny, is game developer InfiniGods, which has found a new home at Arbitrum.

This month, our prominent blockchain gaming Mavens discuss how to leverage the current positive sentiment in web3 gaming.

Notably, or maybe not so, this week also marked Jenny’s debut year, and Jon’s first year back since the website’s inception in 2018, as editor and editor-in-chief for BlockchainGamer.biz. Thus, plenty of reasons to pop the champagne!

Additional news

15th March

What’s caught our attention this pre-GDC week?

Well, while we had planned to mainly focus on the global launch of Wemade’s MMORPG Night Crows, the news was overshadowed by a more recent announcement from Sky Mavis’ co-founder and COO Alexander Larsen, that the company is immediately parting ways with two developers – ACT Games and Bowled.io. Although not too surprising in itself, the rather sharp statement on X sparked a discussion about Sky Mavis’ web3 market strategy and increasing confidence as leading gaming blockchain.

In other weekly Ronin news:

Moving on, we do go into some depth about Night Crows, particularly looking at its ambitious tokenomics and progressively challenging gameplay. Naturally, it’s also our Game of the Week.

We were also excited to get more details this week of CCP Games’ EVE Online blockchain game Project Awakening. Described as a single-shard survival game, Project Awakening is set for a playtest in May 2024, which will allow players to engage with programmable game systems and build their own features within the world. More than that, it’s built on Lattice’s MUD framework, which is designed for fully onchain games on Ethereum and EVM blockchains, and aims to become an open source project as part of CCP’s broader web3 vision.

On the investment front:

  • Apeiron raised $660,000 in its first round token sale, followed by $1.98 million in its second round,
  • Pangu announced a $10 million funding round for MetaCene, 
  • Studio 369 raised $5 million for MetalCore,
  • 9 Lives Interactive announced a $3 million funding round for Nyan Heroes, and
  • Carbonated has raised $13 million for MadWorld.

Additional news

8th March

In a bull market there are products whose actual value we’re quick to question. In our digital era this has become even more tangible. But whether it’s little plastic toys with just the right branding or silly animal jpegs, what even is actual value if not a social construction? 

On this note, we kick off this week’s roundup circling back to a great conversation Jon has had with Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu, of which one of the highlights is Yat jumping into a philosophical defence of meme coins. Indeed, this interview/podcast has so many highlights you best just go and read/listen to it yourself.

Following this, we look at Apeiron’s announced APRS token launch on Ronin, which also marks the first token sale on the network. There are currently three third-party games with tokens on Ronin, including Pixels‘ PIXEL and CyberKongz‘ BANANA, aside from Sky Mavis’ own AXS and SPL tokens. The forthcoming sale is aimed at Apeiron NFT holders as well as the wider Ronin community.

Talking of Ronin, Pixels remained the most popular blockchain game in February. This week it also reached a new high of 1.1 million players of all time, followed by an ATH of daily active players exceeding 350,000.

Another game reporting new highs is 2024 mobile web3 hit Heroes of Mavia, which announced 2.6 million MAU earlier in the week, and later on claimed breaking 3 million app stores downloads.

This week, Jenny gets an opportunity to feature the Mojo Melee cap due to indie developer Mystic Moose announcing a new game title, endless runner GoGo Mojo, as well as minting out its first ETH collection, War Banner, on Magic Eden, and launching new season The DAO of War. Go Mojo, or GoGo, rather.

Aurory’s production team has taken to X to announce it’s shutting down Aurory Tactics due to widespread cheating and matchmaking. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where it’s become a hindrance for Aurory’s other title, RPG Seekers of Tokane, which will now get a chance to grow in areas where it’s been banned before. However, despite cancelling Tactics for now, the team remains open to rebooting the game in a 2.0 version sometime in the future. 

In closing, Jon gives us an overview of one of our most anticipated fully onchain games, Soccerverse, which has launched open beta. This vast soccer game certainly contains some complex management and economic sim aspects worth looking more in-depth at. Its open beta will be the last ahead of the game’s full launch in summer 2024.

Finally, don’t forget to check out our Game of the Week: Axie Champions.

Additional news

Podcast
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