Game tokens are down 37% on average during 2024

And it's worse for tokens that launched in 2024

After the sweet opening months of the year, the second quarter of 2024 has been brutal for the price of gaming tokens.

Looking at the dynamics of the largest gaming tokens — those in the top 300 cryptos — all but two saw their price rise in Q1.

The two that didn’t were WEMIX and BIGTIME.

But because all these tokens also saw their price decline in Q2, taking the entire H1 2024 period into account, the only tokens that are up year-to-date are those which rose sufficiently in Q1 to overcome the later downward pressure, which is continuing.

For the record, those four positive performers are:

• RON (up 13% YTD),

• SUPER (up 12%),

• MYTH (up 2%), and

• YGG (up 32%).

It could be argued this sort of behavior is cyclical. For while gaming has been badly hit, most crypto that isn’t BTC (up 49%), ETH (up 49%) and TON (up 230%) is also down.

Perhaps the reason for gaming’s particularly hard fall has been the sheer volume of new tokens issued during these six months, with plenty more planning for TGE in the coming months.

I’m sure I haven’t been tracking them all but looking at the data for the 40-odd new tokens launched in 2024 I have been tracking, the news is even worse.

Only five of them are up compared to their initial price as listed on CoinGecko, with an average decline to-date of 41%. This compares to an average fall of 37% for all the 240 gaming tokens I regularly track.

As the old man said:

N.B. The one caveat that should be mentioned in this context is that many of these new token launches have rewarded players with airdrops. For the record, I’ve received around $5,000 to-date from gaming airdrops, although worth much less now. But if the price of doing an airdrop is that the price of your airdrop is going to get hammered, I’m with Bernie!

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Calendar

• Registration for MapleStory Universe’s Pioneer testing ends — 7th July

• Moki genesis collection launches on Ronin — 9th July

• Mojo Melee launches its summer surge campaign — 11th July

• Champions Tactics mints in-game NFTs — 15th July

• Chromia mainnet goes live — 16th July

• MapleStory Universe’s Pioneer testing starts — 24th July

• Illuvium goes live — 25th July

Funding news

• In a very en vogue move, “fully onchain PVP hyper-financialized” game dev Cambria has announced a $2.5 million seed round from the sort of investors you’d expect to be backing a fully onchain PVP hyper-financialized game. Bitkraft led the round with participation from 1kx and angels including Pier Kicks and Tom Shaughnessy (Delphi), Soby (Xai), Hype and Alex Brunicki (Backed).

The studio’s first release was Cambria: Duel Arena — originally Degen Arena — on the Blast L2, which saw over $88 million staked, albeit part of that success was linked to the recent Blast farming campaign.

The longer term vision is to create a “Runescape-inspired risk-to-earn MMO with massive onchain stakes”. The first iteration of this is Gold Rush, which is currently being playtested, while players can also start farming the forthcoming BRIA token via a quest campaign.

Attack Of The Killer Bots news

• Following yesterday’s email about the number of bots playing Pixels — arising from its traffic fall following the release of chapter 2 — it appears that Pirate Nation is the latest game to be similarly suffering.

Developer Proof of Play has now gated access to the game using a Cloudflare waiting room and says it will likely stop new accounts being created while it works to scale its infrastructure.

The issue for the game is that it’s fully onchain, so every action is a transaction on its own Apex blockchain. Combined with its current play-to-airdrop campaign, which follows the successful launch of its PIRATE token — one of the few to be increasing in price — it appears this has attracted the attention of bots.

That stated, the Apex block explorer doesn’t appear to show massive numbers, with DAUWs peaking at 1,848 with 2.8 million transactions on 1st July, although this is up from 907 DAUWs and 1 million transactions at the start of June.

According to this tweet, however, the game could be hitting 80,000 DAUWs, with the explanation from one of the developers being that the block explorer is only a proxy for activity because of the way the game bundles transactions.