On an absolute level, it’s a sad, sad day — it’s the first day for a year I haven’t been airdropped some SPS tokens just for owning assets in Splinterlands.
But, given that I’ve managed to accumulate almost 19,000 SPS tokens during this period by also restaking my airdrop — current APR 35% — the pragmatic view has to be that all good things come to an end.
Of course, the question is what happens next?
The obvious retort is that with all that sell pressure removed, the price of SPS will rise. And given the SPS price is at an all-time-low this wouldn’t be very difficult.
But no matter the situation, we all know prices can always go down as well as up, and I think it will take some time for market and product sentiment to reverse direction.
Personally I’m in no hurry. I’ve been playing Splinterlands for over two years, continue to buy cards, and am awaiting the rollout of land assets in the coming months.
Likely more significant in terms of SPS’ long term value, however, will be the launch of the SPS validation nodes, in late 2022/early 2023, which will see decentralization of the game’s infrastructure among players and investors.
And all those details aside, I still think the ability of games to give away assets with real world value to their players, remains a very powerful way of building a resilient community, despite — or even because of — the high percentage of people who will immediate cash out.
In that context, it’s also worth pointing out that during the airdrop period, Splinterlands’ daily activity rose from around 10,000 unique wallets to a bot-influenced peak of over 400,000, and is now currently around 150,000 daily active unique wallets, making it the second most popular blockchain game in terms of daily onchain activity
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital — investing in buidlers
Funding news
UK dev Magicave has announced its $5.7 million seed round, which in combination with a previous angel round takes its total funding to $6.4 million.
This round was led by Bitkraft and Fabric with participation from Sfermion and Geometry, with angels such as Sir Ian Livingstone and Nick Button-Brown part of the previous round.
Founded longtime UK game vets Harry Holmwood (CEO), Ste Curran (creative director) and Ed Thorley (CTO) — I know two of them fairly well — Magicave is looking to build out fundamental primitive assets that will enable “an ecosystem of games, apps, players and creators”.
The first project is dNo, (above) which will combine an initial drop of a set of seven digital dice with other gamelike assets including tiles and figures. Magicave will also provide access to its gamemaking SOLID SDK.
It all looks pretty cool. You can find out more here.
Partnership news
Blankos Block Party operator Mythical Games has announced it will be one of the 21 initial node validators for new gaming blockchain Oasys.
Other previously announced validators include Bandai Namco Research, Sega, Ubisoft, Netmarble, Wemade, Com2uS and Yield Guild Games.
The Japanese-centric outfit is built on the foundation of Double Jump.Tokyo’s MCH+ platform and recently raised $20 million in a private token sale and is gearing up for its mainnet launch.
As for Mythical, it’s building out its own Mythical Chain infrastructure, which originally used the EOS SDK, but now is a multichain network including support for Ethereum.
Fast-moving APAC-based web3 publisher Catheon has announced another partnership, this time with developer Heatherglade, which will see its open-world sandbox voxel builder Elteria Adventures added to Catheon’s slate.
Coming soon to Steam, Elteria Adventures enables players to “battle their way across diverse skyborne islands as they gather resources, face off against aggressive monsters, and – should they choose to enter its dangerous player versus player worlds – fight other players”.
The game already has NFT islands and is also working to allow players to bring existing NFTs items into the world, with support of Axie Infinity and Pegaxy NFTs being a prime example.
Axie Classic World Championship news
Gearing up for its AxieCon finale in September, the first tournament in the Axie Classic (v2) World Championship starts on Thursday 28th July.
The prize pool is $500,000-worth of AXS tokens, of which half are reserved for the open qualifiers and half for the onsite AxieCon component.
Anyone with at least 3 Axies can register, with the final 16 champions winning an all-expenses-paid trip to AxieCon in Barcelona.
Spider Tanks’ Litepaper news
Gala Games has sold NFTs for plenty of games but only has one — Townstars — live. Hopefully that will change soon as Spider Tanks scuttles towards such status.
Anyhow, the project which is developed by Dutch outfit GAMEDIA has released its litepaper, which details how it plans/hopes to be “the 1st web3 esports with earnings”.
One key element is the game’s use of Victory Points, which will be used to allocate the daily amount of SILK tokens rewarded to players.
As a rule-of-thumb, the litepaper says players holding NFTs should be able to receive the majority if their daily distribution within their first 20 victories, roughly 90 minutes of playtime.
However, to control sustainability, the earning value of a Victory Point will suffer from diminishing returns over time governed by the percentage of total supply of SILK token circulating, as well as the amount of SILK tokens that have been spent within the ecosystem that day,
Players without NFTs can also participate through the Pilot Program, a rental system by which each wallet can submit one tank for rental every 24 hours.
Of course, there’s a bunch more nuance, which is worth reading here.
Teasing BD news
Everyone’s currently on the hunt to sign up exclusive games to their blockchain and Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson (a Thiel Fellow no less) is teasing “announcements soon”.
Although there’s also been news some of Immutable’s internal dev team — I think from Gods Unchained — have been laid off.
The two may well be related.
This is the weekly free version of Gamestx. To get all the daily goodness, please subscribe for less than $1 a day. Thanks