If you want to know just how bad 2022 was for the blockchain game sector — at least in terms of projects with live tokens — the news is probably worse than you thought.
I’ve just run the numbers over the 130-odd tokens I track and with the exception of STEPN’s GMT token — which was extremely illiquid at launch — every other token was down, losing at least 50% of its USD value between 1st January 2022 (or whenever it launched during 2022) and 1st January 2023.
The average decline was 87%, but some of the highest profile projects did even worse.
Decentraland’s MANA down 91%
Axie Infinity’s AXS down 93%
The Sandbox’s SAND down 93%
Gala Games’ GALA down 96%
But a decline of 93% is relative. We also need to ask what happened during 2021?
If you’ve forgotten, the news was probably better than you remembered.
In contrast to the scale of 2022’s decline, 2021’s growth for the best performers was measured in thousands of percent, topping out in the tens of thousands of percent.
The Sandbox’s SAND was up 1,580%
Decentraland’s MANA up 4,000%
Axie Infinity’s AXS up 18,500%
Gala Games’ GALA up 30,567%
The result is a very odd-looking graph in which everything is packed towards the bottom axis but requiring a horizontal log scale to make any sense of the growth scale.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to GamesTX to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.