Top 300 Web3 Games Index: ↓4% today, ↓65% YTD
Ronin Games Index: ↓5% today, ↓81% YTD
Immutable Games Index: ↓3% today, ↓77% YTD
AI Gaming Agents: ↓3% today, ↓85% YTD
Jon’s TX Games Index: ↓2% today, ↓69% YTD
Jon’s 2025 Reboot Index*: ↓4% today, ↓62% YTD
*Definitely not investment advice
Back when I was doing a lot of blockchain game presentations in the early 2020s, I’d always have a slide with this tweet from (now ex) Ethereum Foundation member Alex Van de Sande.
I wasn’t sure I agreed with all the points but it did encapsulate much of what I hoped blockchain games would be about, especially point 2.
Then — like everyone else — I got too greedy, and started worrying too much about blockchain games as an investment thesis, over-indexing point 5.
Well, the last couple of years have kicked all such thoughts out of the system and so maybe it’s time to head back to Van de Sande’s recommendations.
Because, as we discussed in our Zebu Live 2025 panel talk in London this morning — entitled What’s Actually Working In Web3 Gaming — the transition over the past couple of years has been strongly away from the attempt to make longform games with tokens and NFTs, let alone fully onchain games, to shortform gambling-style entertainment.
One of the best examples of this trend has been Mighty Bear Games, which originally launched its battle royale game Mighty Action Heroes with NFTs on Polygon, before rebooting a cutdown mode and its NFTs into low risk, high rewards mini-game platform GOAT Gaming on Telegram/TON, which also attempted a novel AI agent angle.
Now, however, as explained by head of growth Koko Amin, it’s concentrated the formula right down to GrabGifts, a TON-based mystery box platform that (potentially) drops Telegram’s digital collectibles — and in future tokenized Pokemon cards — as rewards. These can be accepted and minted out, or sold back to the platform at a loss for another ‘spin of the wheel’.
Of course, this is all very similar to what we’ve seen in recent years with Yield Guild Games, which has transitioned from being the OG Axie guild to operating its own open guild rewards platform and now to a publisher of casual degen games.
Its flagship is Monopoly Go-style browser game LOL Land, which has generated more than $5 million in revenue to-date, thanks to a combination of giving out YGG tokens as rewards — effectively free money for Yield Guild Games, albeit with downward price pressure — with players also potentially gaining an airdrop of Abstract tokens.
With my ‘Where Are The Proper Blockchain Games?’ hat on — it’s easy to criticize these sort of experiences as shallow and unsustainable. But as highlighted on the panel by Metacade CEO Russell Bennett, these are also the experiences that players want and which allow companies to generate revenue and even profits.
A rare win-win!
From that point of view, ‘blockchain games’ have very much become ‘crypto games’, with the focus on the first word of that phrase.
But to return to Van de Sande’s tweet, I refuse to believe that ‘blockchain games’ as he defines them are dead, or have even been attempted with much seriousness.
And if that means that my hopes for the sector now rely on EVE Frontier, with honorable mentions to the likes of MapleStory Universe, Gigaverse and Soccerverse, that’s a state of affairs I’m happy to live with.
Still, even I have to accept that crypto gacha boxes do also “explore what makes blockchain unique”.
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Calendar
Wildcard’s Steam early access starts — 21st October
Wemade’s Legend of Ymir launches globally — 28th October
Sky Mavis stops buying $100 of RON every minute — 30th October
Parallel TCG goes live on Steam and app stores — November
OpenSEA’s SEA token launches — Q1 2026
Win Rewards From Other People’s Inconstitency news
Here’s a new motivational away of making money from FSL. In its move-to-earn games STEPN and STEPN GO, players can now pay $50 in its GGUSD stablecoin to enter Marathon mode.
This is a 12 week program — split into six rounds each of 2 weeks — in which players have to expend 2 units of energy every day to get their $50 repaid, plus their share of the accumulated $50 from all the players who failed to expend 2 units of energy every day. Losers pay the winners, in other words.
It all kicks off from Sunday 26th October.
🔗 Additional Links 🔗
Beam’s treasury is up 12% from Q2 ending 30th September worth $197,709,847. The marketcap of the BEAM token is $268 million.