It takes a lot to surprise me these days, but today I am surprised.
US blockchain gaming platform Mythical Games has announced the MYTH token.
Actually, it’s more nuanced than that. While I assumed Mythical was going to launch a token at some point, what it’s actually done is launch a token, a DAO and a foundation in one fell swoop.
But even that doesn’t properly describe the ambition of what’s been announced.
For, while Mythical Games will “adopt” the MYTH token for its proprietary Mythical blockchain — specifically as the primary token on the Mythical Marketplace — it’s corralled a much wider group of organisations and individuals into what could easily just have been single company launch.
And that’s significant given that one of the big criticism of Mythical Games to-date (from me at least) has been its lack of openness to wider web3 standards and communities.
In terms of the foundation — officially called the Mythos Foundation — there’s a bunch of big names, which have been organized in three buckets.
Games — Krafton, Ubisoft, Netmarble, Com2uS, CM Games, Post Voyager (Cocone), Kakao Games, PerBlue, Third Kind Games and Wemade
Web3 & Metaverse — Animoca Brands, Hadean, Klaytn, LINE Blockchain and Oasys
Esports and Guilds — FaZe Clan, Gen.G, Sandbox Gaming, Yield Guild Games, Talon and EVOS
Points to note are the large number of South Korean game companies involved: Krafton, Netmarble, Com2uS, Kakao/Klaytn, Wemade and LINE.
This is interesting as South Korean game companies are all over blockchain but none of them have yet had much success, and it could be argued there’s not been much strategic thought over their expansion into the sector.
It’s also worth noting that Klaytn, LINE and Oasys are also L1 blockchains focused on gaming, which could be viewed as competitors but which have little adoption to-date — Oasys isn’t even live yet. Building out cross-chain linkage with a big US operator would be a sensible play.
Personally I think the esports element is by far the weakest of the three; only FaZe Clan is a known brand. Maybe best to view this as a work-in-process.
The reason to bring together these companies is that Mythical understands — rightly in my opinion — that while it’s built a strong core technology, even a well funded company with several of its own high quality games in development, can’t itself drive mainstream adoption of blockchain games.
Spinning up a foundation and a DAO incentivizes other companies to buy into what would otherwise remain a custom and semi-closed infrastructure in the hope that, at some stage, these content producers and community-driven orgs will work out ways of integrating with the Mythical blockchain into their operations without feeling like Mythical Games Inc is being overly rewarded for their endeavours.
Indeed, the first external company announced to be doing so is DMarket, the NFT and skins marketplace, which will use MYTH as its native token.
Still, there are a bunch of unresolved questions — notably there’s no detail yet about the distribution of the 1 billion MYTH tokens: it’s an ERC20.
Check out the mint and the start of what looks like an initial distribution here.
One aspect of this is that given Mythical’s raised $260 million in VC funds to-date, what’s the accumulation to those existing investors and/or will there be a new ecosystem fund raise based on a MYTH token sale?
And on a very much more personal basis, there’s not been any mention of how/if the tokens will be used to reward existing and future players of Mythical’s games — of course, I’m talking about Blankos Block Party.
(Yes, I own lots of Blankos. Have I ever told you that? I don’t like to talk about it!)
But, more seriously, this announcement is significant because it looks like it could be the start of process which will see some or (possibly in the long term) all of the value of Mythical Games dissolved, flowing into a token that will be overseen by a foundation, which has funds to develop the project, and a DAO, which provides the mandate for deploying those funds. There’s also a five-person Special Council, which will act as a check-and-balance mechanism.
The underlining bet for Mythical Games — and all its various stakeholders — is that although their slice is now smaller, the pie will end up an order of magnitude bigger.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: Fingers in many growing pies.
AppLovin’s Loving NFTs news
Fresh off its (failed but ballsy) guerilla attempt to take over Unity, AppLovin has launched into blockchain with the release of Vessel, its NFT marketplace for mobile game developers, which is now live through Apple and Google’s app stores.
Combining a mobile wallet and a marketplace, Vessel allows developers to create and sell NFTs to users, with gamers gaining additional functionality and earning in-game perks from such ownership.
Obviously, it’s in early stages but AppLovin’s Lion Studios has been testing the app with an NFT-enabled event in its hypercasual Match 3D game, which we’re told generated “strong engagement and meaningful average revenue per daily active user increases”.
In this regard, AppLovin’s move is similar to the likes of GAMEE’s Arc8 and Coda’s Infinity Arcade platforms, which are attempting to use NFT ownership to square the circle of how to convert the massive popularity of hypercasual mobile games into meaningful long term retention and new revenue streams.
First Look news
Following the announcement of its $25 million Seed round, US developer Revolving Games has dropped the first teaser footage from its Zelda/Animal Crossing-inspired MMORPG Skyborne Legacy.
The release follows a closed preview for the 10,000 holders of the game’s Pioneer Badges and will be backed by a Twitch AMA session, in which participants will receive POAP NFTs, enabling access to future perks and airdrops. Next up will be the launch of the game’s PFP collection.
But Skyborne Legacy isn’t the only game with a new trailer. US dev N3twork Studios has also released a ‘first look’ at Legendary: Heroes Unchained, the blockchain reimagining of its successful F2P card-based mobile RPG Legendary: Heroes, which will run via the Forte platform.
As a reminder, N3twork Studios was originally part of N3twork Games, which was acquired by Forte in January 2022 to provide publishing, BD and developer relations capabilities.
The other result of that deal was N3twork Studios was spun-out as a separate company with a $46 million Series A investment from the likes of Griffin Gaming Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Galaxy Interactive.
Next up will be the game’s founder edition NFT mint, expected in November. There’s also a daily dungeon-crawler game available via Discord.
What No Crypto news?
As far as I can see the announcement of a physical Visa debit card from Mana Interactive doesn’t have anything to do with crypto. But CEO Joe Zhou has a long history in the blockchain gaming space, launching esports betting platform FirstBlood in 2017 — I still have some now-legacy tokens in an old wallet! — before moving onto Mana, which in an early incarnation was also crypto-backed with its own token.
That element seems to have been removed with Mana now positioned as a traditional fiat mobile fintech for gamers, in which US citizens can run a checking account and debit card, which accumulates loyalty points for spending; up to 5x for in-game spending. These points can then be redeemed against in-game purchases and gift cards.
Obviously — with my crypto hat on — the future opportunity is to swap points for tokens, although it looks like that is what’s been removed. (Maybe my crypto hat isn’t always attuned to highly regulated market conditions.)
Interested (US) readers can check out the deets here.
Funding news
Animoca Brands is at it again, this time putting an undisclosed (but likely eight figure imho) strategic investment into Cool Cats Group LLC, the company behind the Cool Cats NFT collection (floor price 2.9 ETH).
The amount wasn’t disclosed but is part of Cool Cats’ move to “expand its gaming offerings”. Recently it did a collab with Animoca-owned blockchain hypercasual platform Arc8.
The deal partly came about as Cool Cats Group executive chairman Ken Cron (ex-Vivendi and Midway Games) has also been an advisor to Animoca Brands’ board of directors for two years.
Was I Right news?
Further to yesterday’s missive about Horizon Blockchain Games’ $40 million Series A announcement, investor co-lead Brevan Howard Digital has written a blog post explaining its “thesis” for the investment.
It’s pretty interested but I will just highlight the following, which details the momentum of the company’s non-custodial smart contract Sequence wallet.
“As of the date of this essay, 40 projects have already integrated or are in the process of building with all of, or certain modules of, the Sequence web3 platform, including web3 games like Skyweaver, Sunflower Land, Ethernia, Mechachain, Metalcore, Mech, i3Soft, CyBall, and Dark Earth;
NFT ecosystems like Cool Cats, DAZN Boxing, and Myntr;
gaming platforms like Community Gaming; marketplaces like Niftyswap, Nalnda, and OnePlanet;
and there are ~100 incredible web2 gaming, and web3-native consumer applications in the Sequence pipeline.”
And that’s why I suggested the size of the investment was less about the potential for Horizon’s Skyweaver game, and more about its infrastructure play.