A week of rewards
Immutable's Perpetual Rewards are live
Top 300 Web3 Games Index: 0% today, ↓61% YTD
Ronin Games Index: ↓6% today, ↓76% YTD
Immutable Games Index: ↓4% today, ↓63% YTD
AI Gaming Agents: ↑1% today, ↓68% YTD
Jon’s TX Games Index: 0% today, ↓62% YTD
Jon’s 2025 Reboot Index*: ↓4% today, ↓59% YTD
*Definitely not investment advice
It’s a truncated holiday week, but nevertheless there was news, most of it bad — at least in the short term.
Yet hope springs eternal, not least in the context of "crypto being a toy system for reasoning about things from first principles".
In that context, blockchain gaming has clearly spent the past few years speedrunning the challenge of better rewarding its most committed players who will — eventually — get to share in some of the success of the most successful games.
The word doing the heavy lifting here is “eventually”, which we are finally beginning to realise should be measured in the context of years, not the day following TGE.
The latest company to attempt the experiment is Immutable, which one-year-on from launching its gems system, has finally given out its first set of weekly rewards for those players who have been dutifully collecting its gems and playing its games.
Now running under the title Perpetual Rewards, the scheme will refresh every week, encouraging people to play as many Immutable games as deeply as they can, in the hope of maximizing their rewards.
And the payoff was pretty good this week with $230,000-worth of IMX tokens given away, with one lucky wallet getting $8,467-worth.
Even I was pretty happy with my $30.86.
Next week, the prize pool is down to $90,000 though, but over time it will be boosted by the addition of various game tokens and NFTs.
Certainly there are plenty of Immutable-based games that could do with a boost.
After running a months-long play-to-airdrop event, mobile idle RPG Immortal Rising 2 has seen its daily activity drop from a peak of 147,921 DAUWs on 22nd March down to around 13,000, following the launch of its IMT token.
Sadly, it’s just another example of a developer trying to speedrun the challenge of rewarding its most committed players without actually spending the time to find out who its most committed long term players were.
Instead it just gave up its rewards to the most active subset of crypto extractive farmers, who were happy to jump through all the hoops offered, taking everything and then casually moving onto the next opportunity.
Let’s hope Immutable’s wider ecosystem approach, which is also designed to minimize multi-accounting, will prove more successful — in the longrun, of course.
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Weekly News roundup
The top wallet wins $8,467 in first drop from Immutable’s Perpetual Rewards.
Launch your own AI agent via Eliza Labs’ new auto.fun platform.
The Sandbox launches gamified virtual zen garden with Deepak Chopra.
Web3 gamer network KGeN expands to MENA, opening Bahrain HQ.
Boxing Star X and ZKcandy collab for 6 million token airdrop event.
404 launches its Bittensor-based genAI text-to-3D model plug-in through Unity Asset Store.
Futureverse acquires fandom platform Candy Digital.
Dubai GameExpo Summit powered by PGConnects runs 7-8th May.
Connect in the biggest games market at PGC Summit Shanghai.
As discussed below:
One Year Ago
Yuga Labs sold some of its games to Faraway, so that its gaming focus would be “razor-sharp on 3D on Otherside”, which is due to go live in July 2025.
Additional Links
File under the tab “Everything is (eventually) going to be (viewed as) crypto”, the EU’s Consumer Protection Co-operation Network (CPC) has released a new framework for the use of fiat in-game currencies that would see them treated as ‘digital representations of real-world monetary value’ i.e. like crypto!
Degen poster child Ronin-based onchain game Cambria has announced it’s generated over $1 million from 8,862 players.
New investor 1kx claims that Off The Grid has 100,000 MAUs and annualized revenue of $14 million; presumably that means +$1 million during the past 30 days. Nevertheless, the GUN token is down 59% since launch, albeit up 23% from its 4th April all-time-low.