#888 The hill to happily die on
Why not all gaming tokens are dead
Top 300 Web3 Games Index: ↑3% today, ↓58% YTD
Ronin Games Index: ↑2% today, ↓78% YTD
Immutable Games Index: ↑1% today, ↓67% YTD
AI Gaming Agents: ↑3% today, ↓69% YTD
Jon’s TX Games Index: ↑2% today, ↓59% YTD
Jon’s 2025 Reboot Index*: ↑4% today, ↓63% YTD
*Definitely not investment advice
Significant in both Chinese numerology as being “extremely lucky” and a divine number in Greek isopsephy as the sum of the letters for Jesus (Ιησούς), I hope this #888 edition of my daily epistle will be appropriately portentous.
Let’s start off where yesterday’s email ended, also adding into the mix the latest X thread from KOL Apix — who despite pushing game token launches for the past year — has now come to the conclusion that:
“Gaming tokens are dead and there is not much you can do about it”.
Of course, “you” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. For example, if the “you” is Animoca Brands, there is a lot “you” can do about it, as demonstrated by Animoca’s ability to increase the price of the CTA token by 91% purely by buying a lot of it from the open market.
Similarly, BlockchainSpace apparently increased the price of its GUILD token by 316% in June by merely spending $40,000 on buybacks.
So Apix is literally wrong. If whoever the “you” is wants to spend enough money buying game tokens, the price of game tokens will go up.
What Apix is really saying, however, is if the “you” is the disembodied selfish mass of people who buy game tokens in the hope they will go up in price — rather than an entity with deep pockets and an ulterior motive for buying game tokens — that “you” has had all the ‘buy game token’ sentiment beaten out of it.
And perhaps that’s a good thing.
As I argued in #876 “Why the tokens that can work are the tokens without worth”, you can’t launch a token at a random set price and expect it to remain anchored around that price purely due to the fluctuations of its own free market supply-and-demand.
The only way a token can remain anchored at its price is because it’s a pegged stablecoin backed by collateral, or because some entity loosely guarantees to keep backing the token with regular purchases, probably a percentage of ongoing project revenue. Or perhaps AppToken!
If you rely on market sentiment, in a fully liquid market like crypto only one token will survive because — as stated in Thiers' Law — people will always prefer the soundest money they can access.
In the global economy that increasingly means everyone — in countries like Nigeria, Egypt and Turkey, let alone Venezuela and Zimbabwe — want more access to the US dollar, something accelerated by the ability of anyone with a mobile phone to access stablecoins and/or T-bills.
And since January 2024, that means all crypto bows to Bitcoin, which is being regularly purchased by ETFs — $140 billion to-date — and corporate entities attempting MicroStrategy’s “infinite money glitch” — $100 billion.
In that regard, the failure of blockchain game tokens isn’t specific to the sector, although it is emphasised because unlike other L1s or DeFi protocols, there’s so little recurring revenue in gaming to backstop token prices.
And that’s why projects such as Pixels’ PIXEL staking are so crucial.
Unlike Animoca’s centralized CTA intervention, PIXEL staking is about combating fragmentation by combining revenue-generating games into a consensus-crystalizing ecosystem using the PIXEL token that will attempt to start a sustainable flywheel.
Significantly, it’s also something that the “you” consisting of the selfish disembodied mass of people who play blockchain games can finally do something about.
Bottom-up value creation in blockchain gaming isn’t a popular hill for anyone — especially KOLs — to die on.
But eventually some of us are going to have to summon up something approaching altruism and make just that choice.
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Calendar
Revolving Games’ RCADE token goes live — 9th July
Craft World’s DynoCoin goes live on Ronin — 10th July
First matches in Soccerverse Season 2 - 19th July
NFL Rivals moves from season 2 to season 3 — 20th August
Wildcard launches on Steam — October
NFL Rivals Reboot news
Season 3 sees big changes a-coming for Mythical’s NFL Rivals. Kicking off on 10th August with a week-long training camp before all features go live on 17th August, the headline news is that the game had become too difficult for new players to compete in, especially in terms of the overall power of the teams. This increasingly pay-to-win environment meant Mythical couldn’t generate high enough retention of new players and hence stopped marketing the game, which plateaued at around 7 million downloads.
Season 3 will provide the opportunity to reset that situation, with the surprising decision to remove all existing base cards i.e. all non-NFT cards. Players will get Training Points in return.
Another big change is that the cards earned from in-game packs will now be locked by default, which means players can’t immediately trade or sell them. Instead, they need to be levelled up and then minted using Mint Tokens to turn the cards into NFTs, which can be sold or traded.
Mythical says this will enable it to lower the price of packs, while also increasing the quality of cards in packs so players get more, better cards. Of course, it also encourages players to turn their cards into NFTs, which is where they are most valuable, both to players and also to Mythical Games in terms of the available monetization options.
As for how the upgrade path works, players will now have to burn cards — including NFTs — to get the required Card XP for upgrading. Ranking cards higher will require burning “same name” cards or Rank Up tokens.
Want to rank up Pat Mahomes? “You'll need Pat Mahomes cards or Rank Up tokens or a combination of the two,” Mythical says.
Unsurprisingly, this sort of thing is already happening in FIFA Rivals, in which each NFT card has a tech tree system, which can only be levelled up by burning other NFTs to collect their specialism points.
More generally, then, it looks like Mythical is becoming more focused on getting players to turn their cards into NFTs, while also making low priced NFTs valuable for the purposes of making rarer, more powerful NFTs even more powerful and valuable.
As previously mentioned, Mythical already makes the majority of its revenue in NFL Rivals when players trade their NFTs; something it’s looking to deepen.
You can find out about all the NFL Rivals’ changes in Season 3 here.
Once More With Feeling news
Gods Unchained’s former executive producer Daniel Paez and engineer Monty Guilhaus have formed Tainted Studios, which is working on V.O.I.D., a PC-based three player PVE hero survival arena game.
It’s labelled as a “token-as-a-game-license” experience in which 1 token is required to be owned to play the game, although there will be a demo version available for free on Steam. There will also be various in-game items, ranging from soulbound items which are bought to tradable NFTs, which are dropped in-game.
The project looks like it’s in its early stage, however, with no funding yet announced.
You can read the whitepaper here.
🔗 Additional Links 🔗
Delabs’ Telegram/LINE game Boxing Star X has generated $380,000 in monthly revenue at a rate of $657 ARPPU ahead of the DELABS token launch.
ZBD’s SaruTobi mobile game is — apparently — the first title on iOS to get approval enabling the use of Bitcoin payments for IAPs.
Yat Siu has been buying up NFT collections on ApeChain.
PaniniBlockchain maximalist SpinotronPC bought their first NBA Top Shot NFT, a #1 Lebron James for $65,642.
The Sandbox DAO is proposing to spend $50,000 on a side even at Korean Blockchain Week.
Tether holds $8 billion of physical gold in its own Swiss vault, which is 5% of its overall collateral reserves.