It's Guild of Guardians' week

D-Day minus 2

Likely I’m overplaying the significance but there’s no doubt this is an important week for blockchain gaming.

The most valuable gaming blockchain — at least in terms of its circulating market cap: $3.3 billion — is launching a signature game.

Immutable’s mobile squad RPG Guild of Guardians has been in development for 14 months and will launch through app stores on Wednesday, backed by a $1 million in-game promotional event.

I’ve played various demos as well as the current Testflight build and — launch gremlins aside — it will be the most polished blockchain mobile game we’ve seen to-date; at least in terms of combining web2 gameplay and web3 onboarding.

Of course, it won’t be perfect in either respect. If nothing else, app store integration throws up as many problems as it solves. But 12 months on from the launch of Mythical’s NFL Rivals — which provides a solid example of how minimize the former and maximize the latter — I’ll be very surprised if Guild of Guardians’ pre-registration audience of 1 million isn’t quickly surpassed.

Even on a speculative basis, its GOG token is one of the best performing gaming tokens of 2024 — up 63% — while its PFP NFT collection has the highest trading volume of any game. Indeed, over the past month, its total of $11.3 million is higher than Pudgy Penguins and only one place shy of Mutant Apes.

So, looking forward, an interesting question will be how aggressively Immutable wants to market the game beyond the initial headlines of a million downloads in ‘X days’.