Welcome to the first quarterly report from the Big Blockchain Game List.
An outworking of 18 months of data collection from the List, our goal is to combine such data with other sources plus high quality analysis to provide contextualized insights into what's happening in the blockchain gaming sector.
Notably, in conjunction with the report, much of this data is also displayed and manually updated with reasonable frequency at the Everything Blockchain Gaming sheet.
//What just happened?
With the price of ETH rising 52% during Q1 2024 and BTC up 65% — also hitting an all-time high of $73,738 on 14th March on the back of $12 billion of inflows from institutional and retail investors in the form of the Bitcoin ETFs — it's clear the crypto market is in full bull territory.
The situation for the blockchain gaming sector proved more nuanced however, with strong sentiment in January and February driven by token launches such as Heroes of Mavia's MAVIA and many play-to-airdrop events — notably for Pixels' PIXEL token — lessening in March as wider crypto interest cycled into more speculative assets, notably Solana-based memecoins.
This isn't to say game companies haven't tried to ape into such sentiment. After prolonged social media shilling, the launch of so-called "universal gaming coin" PORTAL in late February was one such. The weakness of gaming in such a category is that the temptation to invoke utility becomes irresistible. But what's a memecoin with a roadmap?
Thankfully, actual utility was the focus for some gaming projects during the quarter, with the most successful crypto-native investments involving the launch of scaling infrastructure and associated node sales. Examples include Xai's Arbitrum-based L3, which raised $15 million in node sales (technically in December 2023), and Hytopia's Arbitrum-based Hychain, raising $8 million. Gaming adjacent cloud-compute project Aethir raised over $65 million from its node sale.
Other projects talking up their efforts to launch similar tech include Proof of Play (Pirate Nation), TreasureDAO, Xterio and Wilder World. Brutally put, it's now so simple to launch your own blockchain, most projects are at least thinking about it. Whether they need to do so is often considered irrelevant given the opportunity to raise funds.
Notably, at this point it's worth highlighting the power of a growing band of individual angel investors — we could impolitely label them the degen mafia — who are levering their social media muscle to highlight earning opportunities to their followers, often also maximizing their own ROI via valuable referral programs, which can deliver six figure rewards.
Aside from such considerations, however, there were teams demonstrating product-market-fit, with the quarter's obvious winners being Sky Mavis' Ronin blockchain and social RPG Pixels, which in becoming the most popular blockchain game, also propelled Ronin to an all-time high of 1.2 million daily active unique wallets.
On the back of this activity, other Ronin-based projects such as Apeiron, CyberKongz and Kaidro experienced a halo effect, notably in terms of their tokens' value and NFT launches, although they are still early in their journey. Even veteran Yield Guild Gaming's YGG token got a healthy boost from launching on Ronin.
The situation for other playable blockchain games was more complex, notably because while they are playable, their blockchain features are generally lightweight. Nevertheless, headline news from team shooter Nyan Heroes and strategy game Blocklords was they had each achieved over 100,000 downloads from the Epic Games Store, while extraction shooter Shrapnel has seen over 60,000 players across its two playtests.
More significant, perhaps, have been the claims Big Time has made $100 million in revenue since starting its pre-season event in October 2023 from a combination of NFT and premium currency sales plus secondary sales and rentals fees. In addition, Pixels' current monthly recurring revenue for its VIP program is running at $1.6 million. These are the first examples of blockchain games generating sustainable, not speculative, income.
For, it will be those projects that can combine playerbase and revenue with an overall vision and the delivery of new features, while wrangling the currents of crypto sentiment and the peculiarities of their own communities, that will be best placed for long term success.
Check out the full report, which also covers:
Most popular blockchain games
Token performance
Investment trends, and
Ecosystem trends
at the Big Blockchain Game List or get the PDF here.
And there’s more analysis in the video below.
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing 📈 in the future 🔮 of gaming 🎮
Calendar
Deadline for Mocaverse shard crafting — 11th April
Autonomous Anonymous fully onchain game event — 16-18th April
Heroes of Mavia launches its Ruby NFT marketplace — 5th May
Guild of Guardians’ global launch via app stores — 15th May
Next Project Awakening playtest — 21st May
How Shrapnel Becomes UGC Shooter news
Blockchain Gaming World episode #164 is now out through the usual podcast channels. It was a great conversation with head of studio Don Norbury about the current state of extraction shooter Shrapnel, how it’s becoming a UGC platform, why the underlying tech is going to be made available for other devs, and whether general game dev sentiment is changing to blockchain.
Suffice to say, I really enjoyed this episode, even though as stated I am hopeless at actually playing Shrapnel!
Token Frenzy news
With talk of over 60 gaming tokens going live in the coming months, this week’s launches are just the tip of the spear. Nevertheless, they demonstrate continuing strong market sentiment.
The biggest launch has been Saga, which has cleverly positioned itself as a gaming chain despite a lack of named product. Nevertheless, the team’s technical expertise — they were originally part of the Cosmos ecosystem — has ensured the Saga token is currently ranked #174, making it the 14th largest gaming token, larger than PIXEL and YGG no less!
Other tokens include game community Gam3sgg’s G3 token, currently tracking $200 million in terms of fully diluted value, and Planet Mojo’s MOJO, at over $500 million FDV. Obviously both have tiny circulating supplies and low liquidity at present.
When it comes to NFTs, Ronin’s position as the gaming launchpad of choice was reinforced by Kaidro’s Spark Suits mint, in which 2,400 crates containing 9,999 suits sold out in 10 seconds, raising $500,000.
And the secondary market is hot, with rare NFTs already selling for >$25,000.
The other success was social AI sim Today, which sold out its first NFT collection of 777 Ancient Seeds, which can be burned to become rare islands in the game. The floor price is currently 1.4 ETH (c.$5,000).
Additional Links
A record for Wemade’s Night Crows I think: 413,820 concurrent players, with $491,248-worth of CROW tokens minted by 11,079 players.
Immutable will allow games to run their own Immutable zkEVM chains — similar to Avalanche subnets — via its new Immutable Nexus infrastructure.
Guild of Guardians has sold 55% of its Prayer NFTs. Only the $19 options remain.
Device-agnostic gaming OS for handheld gaming devices, Playtron has partnered with Sui. The two companies will launch their SuiPlay 0X1 device in 2025 but the OS is also available for OEM and data centre deployment.
Check out the Big Blockchain Game Report Q1 2024 here or via PDF.