A week of predicting future success
Time for hope
I started the week considering Pixels; both its declining daily activity but also CEO Luke Barwikowski’s comments about how the game is performing financially as it gets better at targeting its best players.
For example, he’s said that during November, the game gave out 22 million PIXEL tokens, of which 11 million were then spent in-game.
His goal is to improve that ratio to 1:1, then “we can start to scale rewards and user acquisition”.
Next up, it was time to look at what Laguna Labs is doing, now that it’s handed back control of its debut game Crypto Unicorns to a DAO backed by a $1 million treasury.
The answer is a new fully onchain game called Neo Olympus, which will run on the B3 blockchain and mint its first NFT collection in January.
It also promises an intriguing vision of combining the liquidity of memecoins with fractional NFTs, which will rely on the new DN-404 token standard — a cross between ERC20 and ERC721.
On Wednesday, I took a look at Delphi Digital’s Gaming Year Ahead 2025 report, which compared the funding of web2 and web3 games over the years, also rudely labelling NFTs such as The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Otherdeed as “Dino collections”.
On Thursday, it was time for a wider discussion of the Ronin ecosystem.
Once again this focused on the interplay between Axie’s AXS token — which is the oldest and most liquid asset on Ronin — and the relative failure of the blockchain’s native RON token to accrue the rewards we might have expected given the ecosystem’s success in terms of onchain gaming activity in 2024.
Maybe the tokens’ flippening isn’t that far away though.
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Weekly News roundup
Apeiron goes live through app stores in southeast Asia.
Ubisoft’s Captain Laserhawk shooter goes live on 18th December.
Laguna Labs unveils new fully onchain game Neo Olympus.
Soccerverse season 1 is launching on 9th January 2025.
Hytopia pivots away from Minecraft to become an independent UGC platform.
Treasure’s gaming L2 is now live.
Guild of Guardians adds new rewards and modes.
Abu Dhabi-based Beam Ventures launches with $150 million fund.
Lisk partners with Creo Engine to onboard the first games to its L2.
As discussed below:
NFT Evolution news
Although there has been a big pump in the prices of some blue chip Ethereum NFTs this week — Pudgy Penguins’ floor price is now over $100,000 — Electric Capital’s latest report points to a transition in NFT activity and location.
Indeed, it reckons November 2024 saw a record deployment of new NFTs of over 130,000 collections, with 97% of these mints happening on Coinbase’s Base L2, which has cheap transactions and also limits the price people will pay. OpenSea stats are that the highest floor price for a Base NFT collection is 0.2 ETH.
Additional Links
Goat Gaming is launching its AlphaGOAT AI agents. Check out the whitepaper.
Web3 esports platform Community Gaming has announced a prediction market Forkast, which will require the staking of its CGX token and give out loot boxes as rewards.
Wild Forest has launched its first liquidity pool on Ronin with the WF-RON pair currently returning up to 368% in incentivized ARP.
Off the back of its Avalanche9000 update, Avax Labs has announced a $250 million token sale to investors.
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