Blockchain gaming weekly roundup: 13th December

By Jenny Jordan on December 13, 2024

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Welcome to our weekly roundup where we contextualize some of the recent news in blockchain games.

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

Most popular blockchain games – August 2024
Immutable’s Gods Unchained unveils comeback of player tournaments
Telegram-based Goat Gaming hits 250,000 users and 3 million transactions
Crypto Rogue CEO Åke André on speaking at Big Screen Gaming Summit in Helsinki, 2 October 2024
Ex-Tapjoy CEO Drobick joins Earn Alliance
Crypto Unicorns cuts team by 80% and sunsets core land gameplay

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

Autoverse Studios secures $8 million in funding
The Lost Glitches’ open beta now live on Epic Games Store
Skale launches its Swell questing platform
Oasys L2 Uprising mints out genesis NFTs ahead of token launch
Immutable integrates Fireblocks to harden security for its devs

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

Pixels launches a $85,000 competitive guild event.
Crypto Unicorns DAO and dev shut down Unicorn Party.
Cosmic Bomber has launched, exclusively for Moca ID users at the moment.
Manchester United has launched a fantasy soccer game on Tezos.
New rewards campaigns from Earn Alliance, HyperPlay, Gamer7 and MetaCene.
Magic Eden is now The Sandbox’s official NFT marketplace and launchpad.

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

Animoca Brands’ 2023 revenue was $280 million
Forgotten Runiverse moves from Arbitrum to Ronin
Filipino crypto exchange Coins.ph launches stablecoin on Ronin
Peeking Duck brings My Angry Yakuza Girlfriend to Arbitrum L3 Xai
Nexon talks about building a MapleStory Universe that extends beyond a game
Smilegate’s Lord Nine MMORPG to use Line’s DOSI blockchain platform
Attack on Titan is launching a game and land NFTs in The Sandbox
Oasys adds 139 games as part of Edia IP deal
Plenty of bots but can TON games blossom into something significant?

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.

Web3 infrastructure developer Mirror World announced $12 million in Series A funding, raised for its Solana-based gaming L2 rollup Sonic.

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

Animoca Brands’ assets worth at least $2.7 billion

Nway reveals cross-platform game Olympics Go! Paris 2024

First Light Games’ Anil Das-Gupta on why app stores must be more receptive to web3

Mysten Labs and Gamma bringing VR-based FPS Macht to Sui

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

Battle Bears Heroes awarded Very Big Indie Pitch winner at PG Connects

Xai hopes MIX partnership will help onboard dozens of PC games

Gaming blockchain Saga announces web3 game publisher Saga Origins

Immutable, Polygon and King River launch $100 million Inevitable Games Fund

Square Enix invests in web3 game store HyperPlay

Elixir and LitLab announce LITT token integration in Tinies and No Way Back

Parallel drops details about forthcoming Solana-based AI sim Colony

Antler Interactive unveils new web3 fantasy RPG Cloudborn

The Sandbox unveils Path to Glory to help tackle deforestation

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

NFT trading causes The Sandbox’s bounceback

Cross-chain FPS Badmad Robots coming to Epic Games in Q2

Sequence launches new Embedded Wallets tech

Ubisoft and Cross The Ages unveil Watch Dogs card collection

1st March

As astoundingly as it may seem when you live and breathe the industry, it struck us this week that some people are unaware just how different the crypto sentiment is compared to 2023. So yet again, that’s our starting point for this week’s recap.

In terms of gaming specific tokens, we talk about PORTAL which launched, to much hype. The project has mainly garnered utility through its heavy marketing on social platforms such as X, where a majority of the web3 gaming crowd hangs out. Portal’s functionality lies in being a web3 gaming discovery channel, launchpad, that aims to connect gamers with web3 games. As you would expect, Jon has one or two words of caution about the team in terms of its balance between sizzle and actual functionality.

In contrast, following a BLAST airdrop campaign announced at the start of 2024, Ethereum L2 blockchain Blast also launched its mainnet this week. Similarly to Portal, Blast has attracted a large following among degens, but differentiates in that its founder is Tieshun Roquerre, aka Pacman, who built NFT marketplace Blur. As such it has more credibility and experience of delivering on promises, although remains a highly degen-focused project.

This week, we’ve also dived into one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the space, Sky Mavis’ Ronin network, and its growing games portfolio.

Three TCGs made headlines on BlockchainGamer.biz this week with Parallel launching open beta, Gods Unchained launching a mobile companion app via app stores, and Cometh CEO Jerome De Tyche explaining how recently launched space-themed Cosmik Battle stands out from the growing catalogue of web3 TCGs, its forthcoming mobile plans, and more.

In Jon’s latest podcast, he had a great chat to head of ecosystem at Moonbeam Sicco Naets, about building on Polkadot, gaming on Moonbeam, and third-person shooter Animo Stars Arena. And in another interview, Jenny’s been talking to Double Coconut CEO David Fox following the team’s acquisition of Splinterlands-integrated TD Soulkeep.

Additional news

Rewards platform Forge joins forces with six gaming blockchains

MegaWorld’s MEGA token sale underway ahead of open alpha launch

Arbitrum unveils 8-week gameathon

Mocaverse expands with South Korean collabs

23rd February

The narrative of the week is the continuing bull case for gaming tokens. However, it’s not all up, because as we discuss this week there’s a clear division between tokens that launched in 2023 and 2024, and more established ones. To that end, Pixels’ PIXEL token launched this week to a market cap of $400 million, while other gaming infrastructure tokens such as BEAM, RON and XAI being some of the best performers.

However older tokens such as SAND, AXS, GMT and WEMIX are down from the start of 2024, although overall they’re obviously still significantly up since their launch. One could argue that the latter’s longer lifespan and proven robustness is to their advantage, compared to the more recent offshoots. As always, Jon provides some nuance and complexity where many (degens) otherwise tend to see things in black and white.

We’ve also been playing games this week, namely

the closed playtest of Bazooka Tango’s turn-based card-battler Shardbound,

Bali Games recently launched mobile game Axie Champions,

Neon Machine’s STX1 playtest of loot-extraction FPS Sharpnel, and

Studio 369’s mech-battler MetalCore.

Our interview this week dives into Angry Dynomites Lab and its CEO Oli Loffler, where he shares great insights on building through the bear, his conviction of blockchain technology, the team’s forthcoming meta economy game called Craft World, and plans for interoperable tokens, and more.

Additional news

Yuga’s new CEO Greg Solano unveils a new vision

Cometh launches Cosmik Battle into early access

Story-driven RPG Kaidro swaps Immutable to launch on Ronin

Blast Royale, Storm Warfare and TapNation migrating to Immutable zkEVM

Champions Ascension integrating Sequence web3 tech

16th February

One can’t really discuss current web3 gaming news without taking general crypto sentiment into account. As we’ve seen many times before, when Bitcoin surges, other coins follow suit, which is more generally reflected in one of the dominant genres of web3, namely gaming. As Jon rightly points out however, the recent funding rounds are longer in the making than the last few months of bull market. With a foot in the field, Jon knows all too well that it can take years before these deals come to light.

Looking at the investment deals then, this week contained no less than four of them, of the roughly 15 raises announced so far in 2024.

Firstly, Overworld, which is led by Xterio co-founder Jeremy Horn, raised $10 million in a seed round. While not much has been revealed about the game yet, it’s described as an anime-inspired multiplayer sandbox RPG, to which all the funding is earmarked. The game has gained positive momentum and minted out its free Incarna PFP NFTs to much hype at the end of 2023.
Secondly, Pixels announced Pixels Foundation raised $4.8 million. The round was led by crypto investor Framework, which also led the AI Arena funding round revealed at the start of 2024.
Thirdly, the less defined AI and blockchain gaming project Ultiverse announced it raised $4 million via a private token sale. Led by IDG Capital, investors also included Animoca Brands, Polygon Ventures, and more.
Fourthly, new web3 game studio Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow announced a $3 million funding round for The Mystery Society. Founded by noted Disney and Universal gaming exec Chris Heatherly, The Mystery Society is a social deduction game currently available on browser and PC, with mobile planned in the future. The team also received a grant from Polygon Labs, with its forthcoming launch on the Polygon blockchain.

Following a year of downsizing and restructuring, the Splinterlands team announced its forthcoming tower defense title Soulkeep has been acquired by Double Coconut, the studio who originally developed the game. Soulkeep will remain part of the Splinterlands platform and ecosystem, but its launch, tokenomics and future operations will all be handled by Double Coconut from now on.

This week we dived into a discussion with our blockchain gaming Mavens on the theme of trust, and how projects can maintain reputation and the trust of their communities, particularly in bull markets. We had some very thoughtful and relevant responses shared in light of the criticism surrounding certain projects lately.

Finally, Jon had a great chat/podcast with Planetarium founder and CEO JC Kim about the story of idle RPG Nine Chronicles, and building fully onchain.

Jon’s also been talking to Big Time executive producer Hunter Hudspeth, about the team’s approach to tokens, and a different way to build community.

Additional news

South Korean game blockchain XPLA expands to Japan with Oasys integration

Dacoco launches Alien Worlds expansion mobile game Battlefleet Armageddon

Spellborne adopts Sequence’s wallet solution

Wild Forest launching first NFTs on RRonin from 22nd February

9th February

Are we already so blinded by the buzz around airdrops and token events that we’ve forgotten about the games themselves?

Three airdrops top our headlines this week, with the first being Heroes of Mavia’s MAVIA token distribution among early players and NFT holders. Indeed, the game has broken 1 million downloads on the app stores within a week after launching and the token price keeps increasing, much in line with Bitcoin and the general web3 market uptick. Proof of a game’s quality? Time will tell.

Next up is PC strategy game Blocklords, which dropped its first round of LRDS token to players and NFT holders this week. In contrast to Skrice Studios and its MAVIA token’s speculative approach, the ERC20 LRDS token is not live on exchanges yet, but serves purely as a utility token, for now. Players can leverage it to buy in-game currency Influence, other game resources and eventually NFTs.

Clearly this is a strategic move by MetaKing and CEO David Johansson, who has been straight from day one about prioritising gameplay and ecosystem sustainability. Indeed it will be interesting to see how these two approaches pan out in terms of growth and sustainability.

On that note, Pixels announced this week its highly anticipated PIXEL token will be listed on Binance on 19th February. More significant news however, is the developer’s plan to phase out its current BERRY token and effectively replace it with PIXEL and off-chain in-game currency coin. The reason given for this, not uncontroversial, move is that BERRY – as an inflationary token – is no longer aligning with the idea of long term sustainability.

If nothing else, Luke Barwikowski and his team shows that decisions and products launched on the blockchain are in fact not irreversible, as long as you’re willing to think anew and rip up what doesn’t work. Is BERRY too rooted in the community that this will have a knock-on effect on the game though? We’ll have to wait to see.

Back then to question one. Is token hype a distraction? Clearly it can be, but not necessarily, if the tokenomics align with a game’s core values and community. As such, it’s potentially the feature that will make web3 games, if they’re any good, what makes blockchain technology irresistible.

It’s not only these airdrops that gets Jon buzzing this week. He’s also published what he calls his best podcast to date, with recurring guest John Linden from Mythical Games. Due to the two knowing each other for some time, Jon challenges Linden in ways that brings about a more authentic conversation and interesting exchanges of ideas. Most noteworthy takeaway is Linden’s belief in web3 games distribution via app stores and the increased revenue game developers can see through NFT trading, and much more.

Additionally

GMonsters and MIXI bringing Fight League games to Ronin

BoomLand’s Hunters On-Chain leaves Polygon for Immutable

$90 million worth of SAND tokens unlocking 14th February

Taki releases collaborative project Game7 Food Fighter

Kitty Inu creator 9VRSE receives Arbitrum grant to launch racing game KittyKart

46% of PC gamers excited about blockchain but not NFTs or crypto

Shardbound announces next playtest starting 21st February

2nd February

Another week, another new gaming blockchain, game launch and airdrop controversy in the world of web3.

Let’s start on a good note, with our Game of the Week. Vietnamese Skrice Studios has launched its Clash of Clans-inspired mobile strategy game Heroes of Mavia, which is already proving popular within 48 hours of going live on the app stores. With Land NFTs offering in-game perks and an airdrop of the forthcoming MAVIA token offered to early users, will the game prove deep enough in terms of web3 to be sustainable in the long run? Jon also explains why the gameplay experience of web3 games can’t simply be compared to that of web2 games.

Certainly we’re given a good insight into a successful blockchain game – indeed the most popular one right now – in Jon Jordan’s recent podcast with Pixels founder and CEO Luke Barwikowski. As you’ll find out in the interview, in addition to its migration to Ronin, Barwikowski’s background has a lot to contribute to Pixels’ current popularity, but perhaps the most striking feature is his entrepreneurial attitude in combination with the new and yet unknown possibilities of web3.

And then there was drama. Firstly, a few weeks back, ahead of its NFT drop, Singaporean game developer SkyArk Chronicles announced a $15 million funding round led by Binance Labs. This week however, it was revealed that funding round wasn’t recent at all, but is the project’s total funding from 2021 onwards. When Binance asked SkyArk to clarify this, the team simply deleted the announcement from its X account, but didn’t give any clarification. It wasn’t until after its NFT mint that the details were fully revealed, and many NFT holders feel peeved off and claim they wouldn’t have purchased the NFTs if they had known the whole story.

One day later, controversy arose around PFP collection Valhalla, where NFT holders instead of the benefits they were expecting as early supporters of the project, were merely getting a 10% discount on a very expensive keyboard, which had never been part of the roadmap to begin with.

Following this, AOFverse ended up in the heat, questioned by certain outspoken NFT whales on X about its sparse airdrop allocation, which was far from what said whales felt entitled to. Now this is just the short version. For more details on the back and forth of this, listen to our full conversation and read our more in-depth coverage.

Arbitrum-based gaming ecosystem TreasureDAO is in the process of building new gaming L2 blockchain Treasure Chain. This has led L2 ecosystem Optimism to eye the opportunity and propose why TreasureDAO is the perfect fit for them. Intriguingly, just hours later a similar proposal came from zkSync. In true web3 spirit, it’s all transparent and gives us a good insight into the thinking behind aligning values and the expansion of blockchain gaming networks.

In this week’s investment news, Pixelmon announced an $8 million funding round, and Merit Circle DAO and Duckland Games’ joint venture Vermillion has raised $7 million for its F2P social party game Forgotten Playland.

Additionally

Darewise and Deadfellaz creator join forces

Alien Worlds releases first NFT comic Starblind

Immutable launches zkEVM mainnet

Saga and Marblex sign strategic partnership

WAX leveraging Solana to expand cross-chain memecoin WUF

26th January

Not so much of an industry headline, but most significant to the BlockchainGamer.biz team this week was our revelation of the Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies of 2024.

Editor-in-chief Jon Jordan entered the stage at PGC London on Tuesday to announce the full list, and today we dive into his thinking behind the creation of Top 50’s. Our long-time readers will be aware this is not the first time he’s undertaken the task – and hopefully not the last – but his experience spans all the way back to 2009 and Jon’s time at our sister site PocketGamer.biz.

More relevant to the broader web3 gaming sector is the news of Polygon’s surging NFT trading volume, driven by STEPN developer Find Satoshi Lab’s Gas Hero.

Like everybody else, Polygon has not been immune to crypto winter effects, with its NFT sales remaining consistently low throughout 2023. Now 2024 is shaping up to be a different chapter however, with Gas Hero driving Polygon NFT sales beyond $100 million this week. The game accounts for $91 million of Polygon NFT trading in the last 30 days, which is higher than any month alone during last year. What’s its recipe for success?

Most recent developer to announce an airdrop campaign is one of our current favourites Blocklords. With two tiers of players being eligible to the LRDS token airdrop, has the team found a way to excite both long-term players as well as new ones?

We’ve discussed it before, and will do it again, because it’s a relevant and significant question; are play-to-airdrop campaigns of the likes we’re currently witnessing a way to build sustainable growth of player engagement? Spoiler, we don’t know, but Pixels is doing a good job of proving that it might be.

Gaming-centred blockchain Immutable has started the year with a big push, announcing this week that Endless Clouds titles Treeverse and Capsule Heroes will deploy on its zkEVM. Plenty more game developers are finding a home within the ecosystem, with Cool Cats and Imaginary Ones being some of the more prominent names among the 250 that are claimed to be building on the network.

Deep-dive: In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, Jon talks to Playmint CEO David Amor about building fully onchain autonomous world Downstream, which Amor intriguingly labels a godless game. Amor is an industry veteran with a wealth of knowledge – which he now has to unlearn. A must-listen for anyone interested in fully onchain games.

In light of Yuga and Faraway unveiling Dookey Dash Unclogged last week, we contacted Faraway CEO Alex Paley to found out more about the integration of its creator tools and the value of UGC.

Additionally

19th January

Yuga fans were delighted this week by the news of Dookey Dash’ sequel Dookey Dash Unclogged. In contrast to its precursor, Dookey Dash Unclogged will not be NFT-gated but free-to-play and cross platform. It’s expected to release via app stores and PC sometime during Q1 2024. One of its new features builds on Yuga’s collaboration with Faraway, and will see the latter’s UGC tools integrated and launched in conjunction with the game. These will enable users to create their own avatars and other in-game items which can then be sold via their own store-fronts.

In a somewhat surprising move, two of the leading South Korean social/entertainment app competitors Kakao and Line announced a proposal this week to merge their blockchains Klaytn and Finschia, in order to create “Asia’s largest Web3 ecosystem”.

Following on from last week’s update on the number of discontinued and canned blockchain games, this week we’ve been crunching the Big List’s data on which chains added most games during 2023. While all blockchains on the list added new games, many also saw a large number falling away. For that reason, some chains came out on top in terms of net growth, meaning they didn’t have as many games discontinued, while other chains are still dominating the market due to the large influx of new titles and/or games having been added before 2023.

Lastly, we look at the rising tide of games and ecosystems announcing play-to-airdrop campaigns. What is play-to-airdrop, how’s it different to play-to-earn, and what are the benefits to developers, as well as players? With L1 blockchain Saga, Solana-based shooter Nyan Heroes and Ronin’s god game Apeiron still to launch their campaigns, Pixels has just finished its two-week PIXEL token airdrop leaderboard and Nifty Island kicked off its ISLAND token airdrop event in conjunction with launching open beta this week.

Deep-dive: In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Manish Agarwal, the founder of Kratos Studios, which is building gaming communities using blockchain, starting in India but also expanding globally into countries such as Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Additionally

12th January

Uncomfortable as it may be, 2023’s crypto winter and general market conditions will continue to taint the industry for some time despite changing winds. In that light it was interesting to crunch recent data from the Big Blockchain Game List which revealed about 31% of blockchain games have now been discontinued or canned. In this week’s episode we look closer at our method for collecting the data, which games tend to dominate the discontinued catalogue and why it’s a relevant metric to predict future trends for web3 gaming.

And on that topic, the number of games migrating to new chains keeps increasing, with game and creator platform Hytopia the most recent one. Following Polygon dropping its support for Polygon Edge software, Hytopia is now moving to Arbitrum.

For even more on market trends, dive into BlockchainGamer.biz’s editor-in-chief Jon Jordan and editor Jenny Jordan’s conversation about blockchain gaming predictions for 2024.

One of the indicators of the state of web3 gaming is NFT trading volume. This week, recently launched Gas Hero from Find Satoshi Lab, took trading on Polygon to new heights and even surged past Ethereum for two days. Joining in the choir was also GamePhilos’ Ethereum-based Age of Dinos which raised $5.7 million via its first NFT mint, followed by Solana card racer MixMob selling out its 10,000 MixBot NFT packages for a total of $2,5 million.

Moreover, ArenaX Labs, the developer of browser-based Super Smash Bros-styled AI-centric AI Arena, announced a $6 million funding round, which was led by Framework Ventures.

One game that’s kept us busy at the start of 2024 is Blocklords from MetaKing Studios. With its Bearslayer season in full swing, we discuss its NFTs, gameplay and approach to building sustainability, and more. Check out why this grand strategy game is one to watch this year.

Additional news

15th December

As tempting as it is to put a Christmas hat on, we’re not going to run ahead. This week there was news from both Ultra and Mojo Melee, which means I could have gone for either of their caps. In terms of Mojo Melee, it’s launched new season Frozen Fates this week and with it the anticipated Mod-able Mojos and Mojo Maker features.

On Ultra’s behalf, it announced its first tradable ‘tokenized’ game – web2 beat’em up title Josh Journey – and its own exclusive FPS Project Citadel, which is due to launch sometime in 2024.

While other investments into the web3 games sector in 2023 could be seen as more significant, Line Next certainly hit a new record with its $140 million raised from local private equity company Crescendo Equity Partners for its mobile based gaming platform DOSI. Other planned products include an AI-based social app that will use the platform’s avatars, and new games using the popular Brown & Friends IP.

Games we’ve been playing include Nine Chronicles M, which has now exceeded 250,000 mobile downloads and together with Nine Chronicles broken 1 million total users and 115,000 MAUs.

We’ve also ventured in to the world of Lummelunda in My Neighbor Alice’s alpha season 4, which in conjunction with the launch also announced a complete migration from BNB to Chromia Appnet.

Games our featured blockchain gaming experts have been playing in 2023 vary, but number one by far seems to be NFL Rivals. No wonder CEO John Linden recently announced the game has now hit 4 million users.

On that note, our end-of-year 2023 features this week include Playmint’s David Amor, Animoca Brands’ Robby Yung, MetaKing’s Davd Johansson, Delabs’ Joonmo Kwon, Mystic Moose’s Mike Levine and Reality+’s Tony Pearce.

For the curious, a deeper look at the state of web3 gaming in 2023 (and all the way back to 2017) was provided this week by Game7’s head of research George Isichos in Jon Jordan’s latest podcast. Furthermore, Blockchain Game Alliance also launched its state of the industry report for 2023.

Additional news

8th December

Accompanied by the inevitable bugs of winter, this week we’ve started rolling out our end-of-year features. A week in, we’ve published some insightful and rather varied span of views from web3 gaming’s forerunners. Looking back at 2023, what’s been the most significant industry news; the huge increase in web3 games being made? The quality of these games? The settling of FTX/SBF gate, or the controversy surrounding Unity’s pricing model?

With the general crypto sentiment very much on the up, and really very different in Q4 compared to the rest of the year, how will blockchain gaming be impacted? Dive into these questions and (lots of) opinions by watching the full video.

Nearing the end of 2023 also means we’re looking back at the year beyond just what made headlines. In doing so, we’ve been crunching data on the most downloaded blockchain games in 2023 through PC game stores and app stores. One of the top games is not surprisingly mobile-based American football title NFL Rivals from Mythical Games, which coincidentally also just broke $2 million in NFT trading volume.

Another developer is leaving Polygon for Ronin. Following Pixels Online and ACT Games, this time it’s Singapore-based Foonie Magus who’s announced it’s bringing debuting card-battle god game Apeiron to Sky Mavis’ quickly rising Ronin blockchain.

Another chain switcher, although technically a cross-chain expansion, is gaming DAO Merit Circle announcing this week its Avalanche-based Beam subnet will be integrated with Immutable’s zkEVM.

Noticeable investments from the week include Endless Clouds raising $2.5 million for Treeverse and Capsule Heroes and Animoca Brands raising an additional $11.88 million for its membership NFT project Mocaverse, bringing the total to $33.88 million.

The Sandbox has launched a major update, 0.9.7, to its Game Client, while also announcing plans to develop “support for lower-end mobile devices”. Since publishing the story, we’ve had confirmation that The Sandbox is indeed working towards a mobile release in 2024.

Finally, an old favourite with lots of new features for our Game of the Week Splinterlands.

Additional news

1st December

Our Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies of 2024 awards are in full swing. To nominate your favourite company, fill out this form. Results will be revealed live as part of PG Connects London on January 23rd 2024.

Happy, sunny and frosty start to December. As usual, we kick off by looking back at what blockchain games were most popular last month. Prominently, since launching on Ronin, Pixels has surpassed both Alien Worlds and Splinterlands in terms of DAUWs. A known contributor to this is obviously bots, but the social farming game is certainly hot. This week it launched a new guilds feature as well as its Mocaverse integration – Moca Clubhouse.

Following the Slush-warm up event Future of Gaming in Helsinki this week, Jon shares some takeaways from various industry talks he attended.

Significantly, it seems everyone now agrees the differences among blockchain game studios – spanning from web2.1 to 100% onchain – are equally as significant, if not more, than the fundamental division between web2 and web3. How do these dynamics impact decisions around user acquisition, scaling, monetisation, and such?

Most breaking news of the week however was the lawsuit surrounding Shrapnel-developer Neon Machine. While it’s often tricky to grasp all the ins and outs of legal issues, in large it comes down to a battle of corporate control between directors and shareholders. In this case majority shareholder Cort Javarone. It’s well worth diving into the details, most importantly for gamers however, Neon Machine has assured that Shrapnel is on track and still set for early access during December.

Although we’ve not had time to play it yet, Illuvium’s highly anticipated PVP autobattler Illuvium: Arena launched early access on Epic Games this week, and the team announced it’s joining forces with esports heavyweight Team Liquid, which will playtest the new mode.

Bitcoin gaming payment network ZBD announced a partnership with PC-based portal shooter Splitgate – which will enable players from US and Brazil compete for a share of a 0.5 Bitcoin ($16,500).

Finally, we’ve been earning heroes and SOL in mobile-based casual PVP Summoners League, from South Korean developer Nyou, which recently launched on Wemix.

Additional news

24th November

Our Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies of 2024 awards are in full swing. To nominate your favourite company, fill out this form. Results will be revealed live as part of PG Connects London on January 23rd 2024.

From a practical viewpoint, how does the choice of blockchain affect a game? This week we published Jon’s podcast/interview with Shiti Manghani who’s COO of Find Satoshi Lab, the studio behind STEPN, MOOAR, DOOAR and Gas Hero. Interestingly, move-to-earn app STEPN is built on Solana and later expanded to Ethereum and BNB, while FSL’s most recent title, social mobile game Gas Hero, is set to deploy on Polygon. The main reason for this, according to Manghani, is the team doesn’t want to be restrictive in “imagination, building capabilities, development or community growth”. Overall a great in-depth conversation well worth a listen.

Something that indicates that choice of blockchain matters is our chain tracker, which recorded two switchers this week. Fully onchain tycoon sim Cryptopia is integrating with Skale and Tezos’ biggest game Dogami Academy is expanding to Polygon.

Social RPG Pixels has sparked headlines for a third consecutive week due to breaking 100,000 DAUWs since its Ronin migration. However, CEO Luke Barwikowski reckons about 40% of these players are bots – and he argues that’s not an entirely bad thing. Additionally, the Pixels team announced a collaboration with Animoca’s flagship NFT collection Mocaverse which will see the launch a Moca Clubhouse including various mini-games and exclusive rewards in the Pixels universe.

Finally the day arrived when Planetarium’s highly anticipated RPG Nine Chronicles launched on mobile – in the version of Nine Chronicles M. Of course we’ve been playing eagerly and, it appears, fallen in love again.

Two prominent web3 gaming investments announced this week include an extended seed round of $5 million for layer1 blockchain Saga and the closing of a second series A round of $10 million for Matr1x’s web3 mobile games, including FPS Matr1x Fire.

We’re also joined by one of Jon’s OG friends – but who is it, and why is it featured today?

Additional news

17th November [listen to the podcast here]

Our Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies of 2024 awards have been announced. To nominate your favourite company, fill out this form. Results will be revealed live as part of PG Connects London on January 23rd 2024.

In light of the recent funding news of $5 million into Bazooka Tango, we discuss what practical impact this size of investment has to a small/medium game developer.

Two more web3 gaming investments were announced this week. Early stage VC Transcend closed its second seed funding round of $60 million and Amazon Web Services announced a $1.1 million investment into new startup accelerator MoonRealm, which is a collaboration with Animoca and Polygon Labs.

Blowfish’s space mecha RPG Phantom Galaxies launched its early access two days ago. Now available via its own website, Epic Games, HyperPlay and Ultra, plus a web2 version on Steam – it’s no surprise that the latter has stirred up a wave of negative reviews. Why web2 gamers can’t just get on with playing the games they love but have to slag off NFT games doesn’t bother Blowfish CEO Ben Lee however, who simply said “We’re here to change that attitude and we have thick skins!” during a recent AMA.

Ubisoft has revealed details of its first NFT drop for forthcoming tactical RPG Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles (one of our most anticipated blockchain games). Consisting of 9,999 Warlords, the collection will be distributed via a free mint on Ethereum in Q4 2023, and Ubisoft is trying to build community momentum by rewarding access to those who interact via its social channels. But is this really the best strategy to build a genuine community? Jon has opinions.

We touch briefly on gaming DAO Game7’s State of Web3 Gaming report. Similar to the research we’ve been doing on the Big List for the last two years, the study is based on public data including more than 1,900 blockchain games, 1,000 funding rounds, and 170 ecosystems. We leave it quite sparse on details as we want to encourage people to read the full report for themselves.

Finally, game studio Avalon has revealed more details this week of its UGC-focused “interoperable and multi-genre” MMORPG. This leads us to think about what impact AI-integration will have on game studios and their (potentially) revised roadmaps.

Additional news

10th November [listen to the podcast here]

October is generally seen as a tide-changer, but the bullish momentum has only increased despite being almost halfway into November. Crypto is up, Ethereum is really up, and most prominent gaming dedicated blockchains and tokens have followed suit.

Ronin has remained in the spotlight this week, with social RPG Pixels attracting headlines for its rapid growth of >50,000 monthly active user wallets since launching on the blockchain last week.

Meanwhile, as the first TCG on Ronin, ACT Games’ Zoids Wild Arena launched this week. We’ve been playing the mobile-based web2 version, as well as been looking into its NFT integration and rewards structure.

We’ve also been playing PC-based strategy MMO Blocklords – Jon since 2019 and Jenny since this week – and Jon recently spoke to Metaking CEO David Johansson about the game’s on/off development and where it’s heading in the next 6 months. Originally from Sweden, Johansson has plenty of experience from working in the film industry as well as the Chinese F2P gaming market and has a very down-to-earth cautious approach to web3 integration many developers would do well to learn from.

Moving on to another project on the up, we look at gaming DAO Merit Circle and its launch of subnet Beam. While a bunch of games have recently been announced to build on Beam, another much larger set of blockchain games seems to be promoted via its platform and Sphere marketplace. All-in-all, judging from its development in 2023 and recent treasury report, Merit Circle is a steadily growing web3 project with lots of potential moving into 2024.

Odin gets blockchain son Heimdall. Wait, what? Ahead of the imminent mobile release of Nine Chronicles, developer Planetarium has revealed it’s launching a new blockchain called Heimdall, which has been built for Nine Chronicles M. As it turns out, the mobile launch doesn’t just mean that currently PC-based Nine Chronicles, which is deployed on Odin, will be available on mobile. Planetarium is essentially launching a new title it calls Nine Chronicles M, which will also be available on PC, but deployed on its own chain. All the while, PC-based Nine Chronicles will also be distributed on mobile but remain on the Odin blockchain – with assets that remain on Odin and can’t be bridged to Heimdall. Seems confusing? You’re not alone.

Additional news

3rd November [listen to the podcast here]

And just like that we’re into November and winter time, and in the silence of night (at least UK-time) The Sandbox dropped the news that it’s opened the doors to self-publishing of UGC. This is a milestone The Sandbox has been working towards for years. In short it means LAND owners can now publish their UG experiences on The Sandbox map without needing to go through any application. For more details of what this move actually entails, listen in to our conversation and read our full coverage here.

During its annual Breakpoint event held this week, Solana Labs launched open beta of its web3 API GameShift. Aimed at game developers, the API helps to integrate blockchain assets into their games code-free.

Plenty of news surrounding Sky Mavis’ gaming blockchain Ronin has been released recently. This week former Polygon-based Pixels launched successfully on the network, and South Korean game developer ACT Games announced it’s migrating its game portfolio to Ronin. Its first release on Ronin will be currently-Polygon-based PC/mobile TCG Zoids Wild Arena.

In even more exciting news, the studio also revealed its working on a web3 game featuring the Hello Kitty IP, which is set for launch in 2024. In true web3 community-driven spirit, Jenny’s had some fun and scribbled down a few suggestions for brand collaboration and design features, including DapperLabs’ Cryptokitties. Just remember where you heard it first guys.

Moreover, Zillion Whales’ mobile-based Wild Forest is the first RTS to launch open beta on Ronin.

Planetarium’s open source RPG Nine Chronicles has opened pre-registration for its mobile release later this month. Jon’s been playing the PC version of the game for years, and dives into why this platform shift is exciting.

Animoca Brands also has a lot going for it at the moment with a recent partnership with Saudi city ecosystem NEOM, which also involves an investment of $50 million. Further, this week the company announced it’s acquired blockchain-based streaming platform Azarus to integrate its vast game portfolio on the platform.

Lastly, we explore what’s up with the recent update of metaverse-optimized blockchain Lamina1, and get trashed in its first browser-based playable demo Space Lasers. Jolly fun!

Additional news

27th October

Terms like spooktacular and spookylicious have flourished generously on social channels this week, but perhaps the most fitting term to describe the current mode is still Uptober. Let’s see if the momentum continues as we approach the end of the year.

On that note, three web3 gaming projects have raised recent funding, including

Uplandme with $7 million for its metaverse Upland, AI-integration and token expansion,
Hytopia with $3 million for its creator tools and Minecraft-style voxel-world builder, and
Neon Machine with $20 million for its third-person shooter Shrapnel.

Due to Delabs’ upcoming open beta launch of lawnmower racer Rumble Racing Star, we checked in with CEO Joonmo Kwon to recap 2023 and revisit his vision for the future of web3 gaming.

In our interview highlight, and Jon’s latest podcast, we dive into a conversation with gaming veteran Kevin Chou about the Superlayer investment incubator, its latest project gamer ID and rewards platform Trophy, and much more.

Moreover, we had an interview with Saltwater Games CPO Chris Abbot about building Celeros: its Fortnite for motorsport, and how the company aims to create social awareness through gaming.

Lastly, we’ve been speaking to crypto platform Crypto.com’s gaming team about the recent launch of its Cronos-based tycoon simulator Loaded Lions: Mane City.

And with whatever time that remained, Jenny squeezed in a few battles of Animoca Brands’ TOWER-powered Chaos Kingdom, which is based on tower defense game Crazy Defense Heroes, but also differs significantly from the original.

Additional:

20th October

New week, new cap. This is the first cap Jenny’s purchased with her own hard-earned ETH, by bridging it from Ethereum mainnet onto Base, and then by minting an NFT on Zora, which served as a token for the physical cap. Although it was far from a joyful experience for someone who’s even reluctant to create a new account for simple online shopping, it’s all part of the ever important learning curve. And the delivery was quick.

Now to our recap of the past blockchain gaming week…

Three investments were announced; climate change focused Zeedz raised $1 million in seed funding and Darewise raised $3.5 million for advancing its Bitcoin-based economy in PC-based metaverse Life Beyond. A third announcement was web3 social gaming platform Forge, which raised $11 million in a seed round led by Makers Fund, Bitkraft and Animoca Brands. While nothing note-worthy in and of itself, what was more interesting with this announcement was that nowhere were the terms blockchain or web3 mentioned. This appears to be a growing strategy for web3 developers wanting to win the hearts of traditional web2 players. Will this tactic prove successful, and more importantly, what’s at stake?

It’s pretty difficult to hide a technical feature that requires users to connect their blockchain wallet. Would it not be better to actually highlight the advantages of web3, such as added depth, security and transparency of digital ownership just to mention the most obvious one? Well, this is a favourite topic of Jon, as our faithful listeners will know.

This also brings us onto this month’s Mavens feature which looks at the need for blockchain education and wider awareness of its benefits to players. By far the Mavens topic with most responses from our range of blockchain gaming experts so far, including Animoca CEO Robby Yung, Unstoppable Games Jean-Paul Farraj and Immutable VP and game director Chris Clay, among others.

Next up we look at fully onchain games (again!), and due to two interviews this week highlighting this quickly advancing set of games, we dive into fantasy world MMORPG Dragginz from the original Neopets-creators and why it’s deploying on ICP, as well as Proof of Plays’ better known social RPG Pirate Nation and CEO Mahitt Mahajan’s larger vision for 100% onchcain gaming.

On this note, we’ve also compiled a list of the top 10 fully onchain games currently live or in development.

Additional news:

13th October

No cap this week. Instead we’re accompanied by our new Pudgy Penguin buddies.

Two prominent web3 games investments were announced this week. Firstly, blockchain gaming platform Game of Silks, which mints NFT versions of real world race horses and base rewards on their performance, raised $5 million in a series 2 seed round. Secondly, Wemix and Mirana Ventures invested $6.4 million, of its $30 million blockchain gaming fund, into five Chinese blockchain game developers. Which ones are yet to be revealed.

This leads us onto Jon’s piece this week looking at blockchain gaming tokens and their 2023 performance so far. Together with Sky Mavis’ RON and Hytopia’s WRLD, WEMIX is highlighted as one of the projects with solid utility and ecosystem growth.

With that in mind, it’s hard not to notice the growth of the Asian web3 gaming market more generally, aligning well with Yat Sui’s comments from earlier in 2023, stating that “pro-capitalist Asian countries both invest in and adapt to web3 more willingly than countries in North America and Europe”. This is further affirmed by The Sandbox‘s Sebastien Borget revealing that 40% of its player base is in Asia, especially Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. In related news, we published a conversation this week between Shuji Utsumi from Japanese gaming giant Sega and Double Jump’s Hironobu Ueno on upcoming title Battle of Three Kingdoms and its prospect of reviving Sega IP Sangokushi Taisen. Moreover, Japanese game developer Drecom announced that its Wizardry IP is entering The Sandbox through Eternal Crypt — Wizardry BC.

Some of the most interesting (and quirkiest some might say) blockchain games emerging lately are fully onchain games. We briefly discuss the reasons developers choose to deploy 100% onchain and look at one such title; 3D MMORPG Dragginz from former Neopets-developers Adam and Donna Powell. Another example is Sage Labs from the team behind Star Atlas, which has seen a significant rise in onchain transactions, and accounted for 15% of all Solana transactions earlier this week. Another fully onchain game is our Game of the Week Pirate Nation, which is currently available in beta.

Jon has had a great in-depth podcast featuring Skale co-founder Jack O’Holleran, where they talked about the growth of Skale, how blockchain games have evolved, games deploying on the Skale network, and much more.

In additional news:

Big Time launched its long anticipated preseason this week, or did it? At least its BIGTIME token launched, and talking about token performance, it’s USD price is up 469% from its initial tracking price, according to CoinGecko.
Nitro Nation: World Tour hits over 500,000 downloads on Google Play
StrayShot signs deal with LaMelo Ball’s BigBallerBrand
ZBD integrates AdInMo for Bitcoin-rewarded in-game ads

6th October

A new month is upon us, which means we look back at the one that was. September’s most popular blockchain games include the usual suspects – Alien Worlds, Splinterlands, and Nine Chronicles – but for some reason we don’t exactly know, Farmers World has seen a record high number of active wallets and overtaken them all. Though this could simply be down to DappRadar changing its tracking of the game.

During September we also saw an increase of 90 games to the Big Blockchain Game List, with the TON blockchain topping the charts of most new games added.

Star Atlas’ fully onchain economic sim Sage Labs which launched recently has seen 6,000 new game profiles added as well as breaking 1 million in transactions on Solana. It’s also unlocked access to its open source modding tools.

Axie Infinity Origins Season 6 has kicked off, and with it comes a whole bunch of new rewards to engage new players as well as encourage more active gameplay among existing axie holders. Other new features include a Battle Pass system, shorter tutorial and quicker turn-duration, speeding up the battles significantly.

As the gaming market continues to struggle, with Epic being the latest to announce more cutdowns, the blockchain gaming space is in no way immune. This week we looked into how Splinterlands aims to tackle the increased pressure by splitting the company into two separate ventures, downsize its staff, and hand over ownership of its forthcoming Rebellion card set to the SPS DAO.

From soft launch to season one, Mythical and CM Games’ car racing collectible Nitro Nation World Tour has officially launched through the app stores and finally Jenny can get it to load. But will it do better than Mythical’s other mobile title NFL Rivals? Jon thinks so, although it might take a while.

Also from the week, our interviews with Bazooka Tango CEO Bo Daly about rebooting its TCG Shardbound with NFTs, and NOD Games’ Dan Lee about how the South Korean developer is adding interoperability to its mobile/browser 4X game League of Kingdoms, as well as becoming a publisher, and web3 strategy advisor for companies such as NHN.

Shoutout to Mojo Melee for this week’s cap – to mark the launch of its new season Harvest of Doom!

29th September

A quick memory-scan through H2 2023, and I don’t think there’s been a week without news of a blockchain game launch. And hot off the press comes the announcement that Peter Molyneux’s studio 22Cans is now preparing for the launch of Legacy on 26th October. The game is deploying on GalaChain, which is not ideal given recent news, but still exciting to see what this PC-based business simulation game has to offer.

In this week’s roundup we also discuss some people’s favourite avocation; NFT bashing. As tedious as it is to our ears, the fact that people care so much about hating blockchain that they (still) see a need to exaggerate headlines about the fad value of it, is itself perhaps a sign of its disruptive power.

We also look at monopoly themed blockchain game Upland and the proposal to introduce a new Ethereum-based ERC-20 called Sparklet.

Two headlines surrounding The Sandbox included the announcement that MotoGP world champ Valentino Rossi’s VR46 Metaverse and Animoca Brands are collaborating on motorsport metaverse experiences and will bring their first one, ValeVerse, to The Sandbox. The other is that the team behind Cardano-based NFT collection Clay Nation has developed a bridge, where blockchain is proving NFT ownership on Cardano for Polygon compatibility with The Sandbox.

Part of our daily blockchain game grind is Boomland’s mobile and browser-based action RPG Hunters On-Chain, so we were excited to explore its new features, including daily missions and the ability to build and join clans.

We’ve recently been talking to Zillion Whales CEO Andrey Korotkov about its mobile-based RTS Wild Forest, F2P vs blockchain, and why it’s deploying on Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain. In another interview from this week we talked to Space Nation CMO Barry Hoffman about building web3 MMORPG Space Nation Online and its use of linear media.

In additional news:

Thanks to Angry Dynomites for the cap!

And here’s a podcast version.

22nd September

One of this week’s features, Jon’s interview with ATMTA CEO Michael Wagner, was headlined The reignition of Star Atlas. Although it certainly feels like more than just the Solana-based space game has caught fire lately. Web3 gaming is buzzing with announcements, new titles and investments – and competing PC distribution platforms are more eager than ever to claim exclusivity and promote their blockchain game catalogues.

On that note, this week F2P battle royale shooter My Pet Hooligan launched early access via PC Epic Games Store. Its developer AMGI Studios also announced a 12-month deal with Amazon Prime Gaming, offering Prime members free monthly drops of My Pet Hooligan in-game assets.

Distribution platforms is also a hot topic in our interview with Mythical Games CEO John Linden. Its mobile title NFL Rivals launched on app stores earlier in 2023, and Linden enthusiastically shares numbers of its success to date, and how the game is driving synergetic IAP monetization through its NFT sales. He also shares what’s behind PC-based Blankos’ switch to mobile, and much more.

PC game distribution store Ultra is making waves by not only promoting web3 PC titles, but also turns them into NFTs, making them tradeable on secondary marketplaces. Games which have recently been tokenized include Mars4, R3v3nge, and Cards of Etherenity.

The largest investment since December 2022 was announced this week, with US developer Proof of Play securing $33 million in seed funding for fully onchain action RPG Pirate Nation. Co-led by a16z and Greenoaks, the investment round also included Anchorage Digital, Mercury, Firebase, Zynga, Alchemy plus angels such as Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasian and the founders of Twitch. Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear also joins the board.

Although small in comparison, but nonetheless significant, game startup Spectarium has raised $5 million in a seed round. The team is working on cross-platform RPG Myths. The round was led by Bitkraft, with other investors including Delphi Digital and Framework Ventures.

In additional news:

Krafton and Naver Z reveal their joint NFT-centric UGC metaverse Overdare, previously known as Project Migaloo, which is set to deploy on new blockchain Settlus.
Aavegotchi launches its Gotchi-themed Game Center.
Leading Japanese exchange Coincheck now supports ApeCoin, IMX and AXS.
Mantle and Rarible launch joint marketplace Mintle.

Listen to the podcast version here.

15th September

Somewhat telling of the gently turning tide we’re seeing, this week 2023’s blockchain gaming investments broke $1 billion. Although nowhere near the $8.2 billion invested during 2022, it’s nonetheless encouraging for an industry that’s still largely trudging uphill.

Three major investments contributed to this, including $20 million for Animoca Brands’ membership NFT collection Mocaverse. The other two were $8 million in seed funding for GamePhilos’ mobile and PC strategy game Age of Dino and $6.5 million seed funding for Mythic Protocol’s action-shooter RPG Riftstorm, its creator platform Dumb, and DeFi product Legacy.

Two games announced they’re switching blockchains. The first one being farming game Pixels, which leaves Polygon behind for Sky Mavis’ Ronin. The other is Darewise’s sci-fi metaverse Life Beyond, which with its assets currently on Polygon announced plans to build a new Bitcoin economy.

Because of the growing number of web3 games and projects now migrating between blockchains, we’ve created a new feature called Chain Switchers. Yes, we do like lists and keeping things tidy.

Zynga’s Sugartown sold out its Ora collection mint, with NFTs now priced at $300. Less in demand were nWay’s Wreck League which also launched this week, and only saw around 8% of the possible 10,000-odd NFT mechs created on launch day. In terms of the game itself, well, Jon’s got a few things yet to get the hang of.

In additional headlines:

Extraction shooter Shrapnel won’t let US-players cash out from the game, thanks to SEC’s securities regulations.
Gaming blockchain Oasys has launched web3 wallet Oasys Passport – and joins forces with fully on-chain ecosystem Lootverse and its AGLD DAO.
Sony and Startale Labs form new blockchain company to create “killer web3 use cases”.
NFL Rivals becomes the first web3 game to be featured on the App Store.

Finally, don’t miss our interview this week with Tiny Rebel CEO Susan Cummings who talks about its social pet game Petaverse, and why the industry needs to scrap the web3 vocabulary and focus on fun and engaging games instead.

Listen to the podcast version here .

8th September

First full week of September gone, and despite a late summer heat-wave (in the UK), judging from the amount of industry news, there’s certainly a sense of a new season approaching. This week we talk a lot, about lots of games.

To start off, we look at which blockchain games were the most popular during August, and what metric is used to rank them. What’s behind Alien Worlds‘ drop in active wallets, what are the new blockchain games breaking into the top and why is NFL Rivals, which recently broke $1 million in trading volume, not among them? Jon explains it all.
Without dwelling on it, we couldn’t not mention the lawsuit surrounding Gala Games and the (now) obvious reason behind its token fork and burn. Of course Gala hopes this won’t affect its business, but what impact it has remains to be seen. Although painful for the wider industry in the short term, sorting the wheat from the chaff is probably better in the long run.
Further, we dive into the pre-beta release of Axie Infinity: Homeland which is accompanied by a new rewards system, the removal of seasons and a significant change in staking structure. With 20% of staking rewards being diverted into game rewards, Sky Mavis is looking to encourage more gameplay. Good news for active Homeland players.
Due to nWay Games’ upcoming launch of anticipated mech-battler Wreck League on Thursday September 14th, Jon has had an in-depth conversation with nWay’s CEO Taehoon Kim about its web2/web3 strategy, how the company is bridging F2P gamers and its focus on esport.
We’ve been playtesting Shardbound from Bazooka Tango this week. Check out our Game of the Week for more details.
Zynga’s mini-game platform Sugartown‘s first Ora collection mint begins 13th September, but why is it restricted to US, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam?
Plenty of web3 gaming news are released in light of Korea Blockchain Week, and no doubt more is to come, but the most prominent so far is that Nine Chronicles developer and web3 game publisher Planetarium is working on two new RPGs, Verse8 and Immortal Rising 2.
On top of this Krafton has partnered with Circle and AngelHack to announce new Cosmos-based blockchain Settlus. Described as a “transparent settlement system for the creator economy”, Settlus will settle transactions using the USDC stablecoin. The first project to adopt the system is Krafton’s own Migaloo metaverse.

Listen to the podcast version here.

1st September

39 new games were added to the Big List this month, and in light of the announcements surrounding a bunch of big blockchain titles recently, including Ubisoft’s Champions Tactics, Zynga’s Sugartown and nWay’s Wreck League, we discuss the current state of blockchain gaming. We’d argue that these games, and the remarkable fact that so many developers are still building despite recent market conditions are an encouraging sign for the industry.
To further emphasise our point, we’ve compiled a list of our most anticipated blockchain games in 2023.
Since the launch of its in-app marketplace, Jon has been tracking NFL Rivals, comparing the prices of NFTs in its marketplace vs. in-app.
Mojo Melee launched its second free NFT with Amazon Prime Gaming, also launching its web marketplace using Sequence’s tech.
Animoca Brands announced its 2022 financials. Bookings were up 32% to $402 million.
Apart from NFL Rivals, we’ve been playing Com2uS’ casual mobile game Minigame Party, which is also our game of the week.
Don’t miss this week’s opinion piece by Ultra CEO Nicolas Gilot on how web3 can thaw the esports winter.

Listen to the podcast version here.

25th August

As Gamescom 2023 is drawing to a close, the BlockchainGamer.biz team returns to native soil. However full service won’t commence until next week. This mean that our roundup lacks a video and audio this week, but we’ll still highlight some of our favourite topics from the week, including:

Our list of the top 10 most anticipated blockchain games has gone live. While this has been in development for some time, we’ve had to remove some games that went live along the way, as well as make room for more recently announced titles, the list is dynamic and includes 10 really exciting titles we can’t wait to play.
Following its soft launch in June, NFL Rivals has quickly climbed the ranks and become one of the biggest mobile titles in web3 with nearly 2 million downloads. Mythical Games has now launched the proper season, Kickoff, and alongside the launch also introduced an in-app NFT marketplace. After a few weeks of holiday from the game, Jenny is excited to be back on the pitch, with the added bonus of smoother gameplay and an easier-to-navigate dashboard.
In other news, Mighty Action Heroes has enabled social logins using Sequence integration and Sky Mavis’ Ronin ecosystem welcomes thirdparty developer Zillion Whales and its mobile-based RTS Wild Forest.
Don’t miss this week’s opinion piece by Playmint UK CEO David Amor on building fully onchain autonomous world Downstream, and why decentralization is the way forward in games.

18th August

This week we go all in on Zynga’s announcement of its first web3 title Sugartown, which was announced on Monday.

The game will launch its first 10,000 NFTs on Ethereum via the Forte platform as a free mint later in 2023. These will be required to access Sugartown – users will stake the NFTs to generate energy – which is described as a platform consisting of mini-games. More NFTs will be made available as the game scales up.
A few weeks on from the news that Star Atlas dev ATMTA is cutting back significantly on staff and visionary strategy, our blockchain gaming Mavens shared their varying in-depth knowledge on how this might impact the perception of the blockchain game sector as being both inexperienced in terms of development skills and financial management.
In our interview this week we speak to head of game design at Parallel, Kohji Nagata, who gives us a look behind the scenes of this exciting sci-fi TCG and why the studio is focusing on building best, not wide.

11th August

Starting off with a look at three different blockchain mobile games:

An early mode of one of our most anticipated blockchain games, Nitro Nation: World Tour, released through the app stores this week. Season 0, called Head Start, offers players a glimpse of this mobile-based racing car and collection game, and its NFT Club feature. Despite our excitement tapering off somewhat due to the underwhelming experience of incomplete menus, and more, we look forward to the full release of what has the potential to be a great game appealing to F2P mobile gamers and web3 gamers alike.
We talk about game developer Com2uS and its high-profile Summoners War: Chronicles. Jon recently had a chat to Com2uS US president Kyu Lee about how the company’s XPLA blockchain was born in light of the Terra collapse, Com2uS’ radical move to deploy all of its games on blockchain, and how this wasn’t well received by everyone, and more.
This week BlockchainGamer.biz also had an interview with Moonlit Games’ co-founder Patrick McGrath, who deep-dives into the studio’s F2P rougelike RPG Rogue Nation, talks about his love for games and explains how web3 adds much more value than just asset ownership. Rogue Nation is another title adapted for mobile, which launches its new chapter Proteus Thursday 17th August, available on Google Play and Apple App Store.

In other news this week:

Sky Mavis extended its Axie Builders Program by launching Mavis Hub Greenlight.
Ultra’s esports platform Ultra Arena is now live.

Lastly:

Don’t miss our Game of the Week: Nitro Nation.

4th August

In this week’s episode we dive into:

New mech combat game Wreck League was announced by Animoca Brands’ nWay studio. While players are incentivised to construct, and deconstruct their mechs using 10 various parts which are NFTs, the game also includes PVP battles. Notably, season one incorporates Yuga Labs’ renown collections Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Bored Ape Kennel Club, and Otherside Kodas. Significantly, Wreck League will be adapted for both for web2 and web3 players, with NFT rewards as well as the ability to sell NFTs mechs as non-NFT assets.
Following in the footsteps of Mythical’s Blankos Block Party, Mystic Moose announced this week that its autochess battler Mojo Melee is coming to Amazon Prime’s games promotion. While still early days, will this strategy work for web3 games looking to go mainstream?
Elaborating on the theme of blockchain games blurring the line between web2 and web3, we also look at the highly anticipated Nitro Nation: World Tour and Guild of Guardians.

28th July

Gm and happy Friday yet again. This week:

We look into the news that one of the most ambitious web3 games in the sector, Solana-powered Star Atlas from ATMTA, announced it’s going through a major restructuring, which includes cutting back 73% of its staff and downsizing its vision. Are more projects still suffering in the wake of FTX, and is this just a sign of more to come?
Solana-based Aurory revealed its cross-chain expansion plans will start by adopting Ethereum scaling tech Arbitrum.
3,000 of CyberKongz’s Genkai NFTs have launched on Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain (and Ethereum), selling out in an hour and generating $1.4 million. As part of the news, CyberKongz and Sky Mavis also revealed plans to release a Genkai-themed game together.
South Korean game dev Delabs announced a $4.7 million seed round this week. Jon has been chatting to Delabs’ head of web3 strategy, Quinn Kwon, about its passion for web3, the studio’s kart-rider game Rumble Racing Star and forthcoming titles Space Frontier and Meta Bolts.
In closing we take a brief look at our Game of the Week, MetalCore, which kicks off its live playtests today, Friday 28th July.

July 21st

While the BlockchainGamer.biz team is on mini holiday there’s no video or podcast roundup. Still, some noticeable blockchain gaming news broke this week, so let’s do a quick recap.

The Sandbox reached a core milestone in its vision to become a truly open metaverse by enabling its Landowners to create and submit their user generated content for early approval. The big launch is scheduled for later in 2023.
Jon has been chatting to Bright Star CEO Mark Laursen about MMORPG Ember Sword, his vision of the game and about its onboarding strategy.
In light of Ubisoft recently announcing its first web3 title, our blockchain mavens discussed its impact for future adoption of blockchain technology in the gaming sector.
In investment news, Pangu Software announced the closing of a $5 million seed round for its MMORPG MetaCene. This brings total investments into blockchain games during 2023 to $894 million.
As part of its PlayGG event in San Diego, Solana Labs announced new web3 game technology GameShift. In collaboration with real-time engine MetaGravity, Solana-powered Star Atlas also used the event to stress test its space metaverse, with 5,000 users interacting in a single non-instanced environment within Unreal Engine 5.
Finally, our Game of the Week, BoomLand’s Hunters On-Chain, successfully launched on Polygon mainnet for its Genesis Hunter holders.

July 14th

Following on from Mystic Moose’s launch of Mojo Melee last week, we share our early impressions of the game so far. One of us is winning, one’s not.
Mighty Bear Games announced earlier this week that its battle royale Mighty Action Heroes is switching from Polygon to Arbitrum and the TreasureDAO ecosystem. Arbitrum seems to be gaining momentum as an increasingly popular blockchain for games, something Jon also wrote a short opinion piece about this week.
Some play it up as highly significant, and it’s certainly welcomed by the industry, but what does Google Play’s new policy on NFTs actually mean and what are the practical implications for blockchain games?
We look into the three titles NFT collection Cool Cats announced it’s working on this week.
Finally, we discuss Binance Labs’ $15 million investment into Xterio, the titles it’s working on, token launch, and more.

Also check out our

Game of the Week, Mighty Action Heroes, which launches open beta Friday 14th July.
Jon’s in-depth chat with Moonstream’s co-founder and CEO Neeraj Kashyap about how to build strong blockchain game economies and stop them from blowing up.

July 7th

We’ve mentioned it many times, but this week we take an in-depth look at the Big Blockchain Game List. As we’ve crossed the half year mark we elaborate further on H1 2023 data on discontinued blockchain games as well as new games by chain. We talk about metrics, multichain projects and why Polygon has overtaken BNB as the top blockchain for gaming.
Mojo Melee has launched season 1 on Polygon and is working towards a full mobile release later in 2023, but how can blockchain technology enhance this autochess battler?
Similarly, we ask the question regarding Eyeball Pool in light of Eyeball Games announcing this week the game is coming to Immutable. How can blockchain be successfully integrated in a pool game? And is there room for another top pool game such as Miniclips’s 8 Ball Pool?
In closing we look at our Game of the Week, multiplayer browser FPS Mini Royale: Nations. Running on Solana, the game has recently launched season 5, Pirate booty. We continue on the topic of blockchain integration, and how this game has embraced interoperability and user created content since its launch in late 2021.

June 30th

We’re excited about it, but why is everyone else so quiet about the announcement of Ubisoft developing its first blockchain game?
And additional news breaking from Oasys’ special event this week.
Of course we dive into Jon’s favourite topic: Mythical Games, and the recent series C1 round of $37 million.
Pixion Games also announced that it’s raised $5.5 million for Fableborne, and Jon’s been talking to CEO Kam Punia.
We briefly touch on Heroes of Mavia‘s open beta launch as well as the global launch of Anipang Blast, our Game of the Week.

June 16th

Our starting point this week is Gala Games, and the company’s approach to blockchain game development and publishing as we understand it. We talk about Gala’s game catalogue and focus particularly on our Game of the Week: Eternal Paradox, currently on a three week playtest.
We briefly touch on the upcoming playtests of Synergy Land and Legendary: Heroes Unchained, which leads us onto a discussion about the range of blockchain integration in games, the spectrum of mobile-first games just using NFTs to hardcore fully on-chain games.
Our Mavens this week also joined in the discussion about mobile blockchain games, and more specifically shared their outlook on mobile app stores as a key distribution channel for web3 games in 2023.
With all that’s going on with the SEC, its crypto resistance and security labelling of The Sandbox’s SAND token, Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu has shared his bright vision on the future of blockchain in other parts of the world. Here we also refer to a great interview Jon did with Siu earlier in 2023.
And don’t miss our interview this week with Ultra’s co-CEO Nicolas Gilot on building ‘blockchain Steam on steriods’.

* We regularly refer to the Big List, but obviously not everyone’s familiar with what we mean. So, just to make sure we’re on the same page, this is the Big Blockchain Game List.

June 9th

Does the web3 gaming sector need another game launcher?

This and more is up for discussion this week in light of game store launcher and aggregator HyperPlay’s recent announcement of $12 million series A funding.
Is CM Games and Mythical’s Nitro Nation: World Tour car sales, which went live this week, worth being bullish about? At least one of us is.
Jon has had a great in-depth conversation with Laguna Games’ CEO Aron Beierschmitt about Crypto Unicorns and the recent launch of Unicorn Party, its IP extension including “funnel” games Bumpercorns and Mob Run.
We mention this week’s interview with The Sandbox COO and co-founder Sebastien Borget, and
Lastly, do you have to be a full time gamer to enjoy Crypto Unicorns? Check out why it’s our Game of the Week.

June 2nd 2023

It seems we’re not the only ones who have had a few days in the sun this week. The whole blockchain games industry is a bit thin on news. Nonetheless, accompanied by a very special celebrity guest, we managed to round up some of the most relevant topics from the week as follows:

The Big Blockchain Game List’s data on new games added in May and a few reflections on the number of new l2 blockchains emerging.

Three interviews we’ve published this week;

Neon Machine’s Aaron Nonis about building triple-A shooter Shrapnel,
Mighty Bear’s Simon Davis on “building a blockchain game fighting for your right not to eat Hawaiian pizza”, and
Cross The Ages’ CEO Sami Chlagou on building a narrative-driven TCG with deep strategy elements and NFTs. For more on Cross The Ages, check out our Game of the Week.

In closing, we look at some of the new projects we’re hopeful about for 2023 (and 2025).

May 26th 2023

We started off looking at this week’s investments, notably Loot Labs’ $1.5 million pre-seed and BoomLand’s $1 million pre-seed and its exciting milestone of reaching 10,000 Hunters On-Chain players on the testnet.
We looked at the total of $741 million investments into blockchain games so far in 2023, comparing it to previous year’s very different market conditions. In regards to other investment news, we discuss the reasons why some companies do not disclose exact numbers.
In launch news we mention SkyVu’s top-down shooter Battle Bears Heroes, which is the first of Sky Mavis’ thirdparty games to launch on the Ronin network. The game has soft launched on Google Play and App Store, which takes us into…
The ever continuing complicated relationship of web3 mobile games and app stores. Jon shares the process of buying STEPN NFTs using Apple Pay, and why it’s not so straight-sailing. Is Solana’s Saga phone and similar solutions a better way forward for blockchain mobile games?
Finally, make sure you check out our Game of the Week: GRIT, and don’t miss this week’s prominent interviews with Cronos Lab’s Ken Timsit and Venly’s Stefan Colins on the future of blockchain gaming and Metaking Studios’ David Johansson on building Blocklords.

May 19th 2023

This week we dig into Gala Games and its unexpected move to burn 15 billion Gala tokens to “counter the dump and exit scenario”. How does this actually work, and is it a good strategy?
Next we look into Sky Mavis’ announcement that Axie Infinity Origins (which is also our Game of the Week) has gone live on Apple App Store in parts of South America and southeast Asia. What does this mean in terms of it being a blockchain game? Has Apple changed its initial rejection of blockchain games and assets on its store?
Looking closer at a selelction of launches from this week, particularly Aurory’s Prologue to Adventures, and the Sui games launch #1.
Lastly, we talk briefly about our first Mavens feature that was published this week.

May 12th 2023

Starting off with sad news this week of US developer Irreverent Labs announcing that the development of MechaFightClub has been paused indefinitely.
We move on to some better news of a selection of this week’s launches – Gala Games Grit, the community beta of Metaking Studio’s Blocklords as well as Affyn’s announcement of new web3 mobile title Buddy Arena.
We close by talking about the recent updates and blockchain integration of the games we’re currently enjoying, among them are NFL Rivals, Hunters On-Chain and not to forget our Game of the Week, Blocklords.

May 5th 2023

Sui mainnet has gone live this week, which was followed by the news that 13 games would launch on its network. We take a closer look at the selection of the games, and more.
We also look at Com2uS’ recent announcement of two new blockchain titles; Ace Fishing: Crew and Minigame Party: Pocket Edition.
Jon wrote an article about Epic Games Store and its 18 listed blockchain games. This sparks the larger question whether the web2 market is starting to realise and adopt to the inevitable power of web3 gaming.
Further we take a brief look at this month’s data on the most popular blockchain games and the apparent status quo in the order of current top blockchain games.
As usual, we close with a highlight of our Game of the Week: Xeno Dragon.

April 28th 2023

This week we talk a lot about

Mythical Games;

securing an investment of $20 million from Scytale Digital
migrating to Polkadot
did its DAO have a say on the move?
and its launch of American football mobile game NFL Rivals

Other news we talk about is the launch of Ultra Games, and the different way games and platforms adapt to and launch their products in web3.
We also highlight Jon’s interview with Alex Paley from Faraway and Lior from Mutant Cartel and their forthcoming city builder Serum City.
Last we look at Game of the Week: NFL Rivals.

April 21st 2023

Among this week’s topics we discuss:

Two noticable investments; Swedish game developer Goals series A of $20 million and Krafton and Naver Z’s joint investment of $37 million into the Migaloo project.
We try to make sense of Gala Games’ upcoming airdrop of GALA v2 tokens. What’s the purpose of it? (Hint: we still don’t know…)
We talk about Merit Circle’s web3 gaming subnet Beam, on Avalanche, as part of a wider context of layer 2 solutions.
Last of all, we elaborate on why InfiniMerge is our Game of the Week.

April 14th 2023

This week we talk about the launch of Solana’s web3 phone Saga. What more exactly is exciting about its launch? Will this be a ground breaking point where we see other operators adopt to the web3 mobile era and follow suit?
We elaborate on the Indian blockchain gaming market, in light of the investment announcement of $20 million from game developer Mayhem Studios.
We also touch on StarkWare’s investment in Unstoppable Games’ space MMO Influence.
Among other releases we look at the latest games coming to Ultra, Tuesday 25th April.
Lastly, we look closer at our Game of the Week: Mojo Melee.

April 7th 2023 – (This week’s format is a little different as we are together, in a holiday flat, with the children slightly interrupting in the background. We hope you can still make sense of our conversation about the hottest topics of the week in blockchain gaming…)

We talk about Ultra’s forthcoming global launch 25th of April.
Gunzillas announcement of web3 games platform Gunz.
Some noticeable mints/announcements from the past week.
As ever, we finished with a look at our Game of the Week, CryptoCrusades, and the reasons why we picked it.

March 31st 2023

This week we covered the Sky Mavis announcement about the first games from external developers launching on its Ronin blockchain, including Directive Game’s The Machines Arena and Bowled.io’s crickets games.
We talked about Blocklords, among other games, and the slight confusion about what chain the game is actually running.
Jon interviewed Immutable’s Robbie Ferguson this week. What did he take away from their conversation?
Arc8 and its biggest updates to-date was on the agenda, as well as some of this weeks game releases and mints.
As ever, we finished with a look at our game of the week, Blast Royale, and the reasons we picked it.

March 24th 2023

This week we covered the news about an upcoming web3 game in the EVE Online universe. We also looked at Immutable’s plans to reboot PC game Shardbound.
We discussed the announcement about Immutable’s zkEVM being powered by Polygon.
Although not covered on our site, we discussed the SEC warning Coinbase about securities charges and what impact it might indirectly have on the blockchain industry.
To round off, we explained further why Hunters On-Chain is our Game of the Week.

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