Welcome to our regular look at the most popular blockchain games, using data from DappRadar.
With the first quarter of 2024 completed, it’s time to take a longer look at what’s been happening in terms of the most popular blockchain games, notably in terms of activity since the previous up cycle in 2022.
Back then, Axie Infinity had just come off its November 2021 high and was in decline as its economy over-expanded and collapsed. In that context, it’s worth noting that although the game has seen some recent growth in the shape of Axie Infinity: Origins, it remains two orders of magnitude off its all-time player peak and seems highly unlikely to regain those heights.
Following the decline of Axie Infinity, Alien Worlds and Splinterlands became the most popular blockchain games, maintaining this status until the current cycle, although steadily losing audience during 2022 and 2023.
The uptick in crypto sentiment, which started in late 2023, only accelerated their decline, something also reflected in the failure of their underlying tokens to regain any price momentum.
Instead, the new cycle has propelled a new game to the top of the tree.
Originally operated on Polygon for a number of years, social RPG Pixels relaunched in November 2023 on the Ronin blockchain and the combination of an iteratively developed product with a strong community on a surgent infrastructure resulted in explosive growth from the get-go.
In addition, Pixels leveraged the deprecation of its BERRY token, replaced by the new PIXEL token, with a play-to-airdrop campaign that further boosted headcount. This success then drew in more support from community projects such as Animoca’s Mocaverse and now guilds such as YGG.
The result has been hockey-stick growth, which in the short-term shows no sign of slowing.
However, as previously seen with Axie Infinity, what will be more significant will be at what level the Pixels team manages to sustain its playerbase over the coming months.
As for the games we label the “next most popular blockchain games”, the crypto cycle is also throwing up growth but nothing at the level of Pixels.
Idle RPG Nine Chronicles continues its rise to over 60,000 daily active unique wallets but this is a mere 10% of Pixels audience.
In further months, it will also be worth paying close attention to Apeiron, which like Pixels will launch on the Ronin blockchain. The current onchain activity highlighted isn’t from the game itself, however, as this is currently only available as a non-blockchain demo via Epic Games Store. Instead this activity is related to the launch of its APRS token on Ronin, including an airdrop event.