Is it a genuine trend or just a set of local coincidences in my head?
Hard for me to judge but I’d like to think there’s a slow growing groundswell in the direction of fully onchain games.
But perhaps I’m being unduly influenced by my most recent podcast with Proof of Play’s CEO Amitt Mahajan, which recently announced a $33 million seed round for its vision of building onchain games and onchain game logic that will be accessible for everyone to play and build on.
Of course, Mahajan is not the first to venture down this rabbithole.
Star Atlas’ Sage Labs recently launched, hoovering up chain capacity on Solana, while Playmint’s David Amor has delved way beneath the seventh circle in the development of forthcoming game Downstream. I’ve also been working with onchain soccer management game Soccerverse since 2018.
Even Mrs Jordan is in on the act, interviewing the original Neopets team about their onchain MMORPG Dragginz, as well as highlighting what in her opinion are the Top 10 Fully Onchain Games.
In terms of timing, partly I think all this is an outworking of having blockchain infrastructure that can now handle the UX and throughput required to run these sorts of experiences at decent speed and cost. Proof of Play’s Pirate Nation is live on the Arbitrum Nova L2 for example, while Dragginz will launch on the ICP blockchain.
More significantly, however, I believe the driving force for many of the creatives involved is that fully onchain games answer the oft-posed question “If blockchains are so good, why aren’t you making games that can only be made using a blockchain?”
Or as Amitt Mahajan — who was also a co-creator of FarmVille puts it —
Obviously there are types of games we can’t build. We can’t build a FPS onchain. Doesn’t make sense. But there’s a type of game that works really well and we also get a whole bunch of features for free. All the economic trading stuff, the trustless environment, security and auditability.
This is the most interesting part. I’ve built games before. Why would I want to go and build another mobile gaming company and just replace the payment rails [with blockchain]? It’s not appealing to me personally or intellectually.
But this stuff is because it’s new.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of games
Calendar
Formula E: High Voltage launches — 19th October
Boomland launches its BOOM token — 19th October
Xterio opens its marketplace — 22nd October
Aavegotchi is going live in The Sandbox — 25th October
Peter Molyneux’s Legacy launches — 26th October
Dogami Academy launches early access — 30th October
Phantom Galaxies goes into early access — 2nd November
Funding news
French developer Darewise has raised $3.5 million from a pre-sale of the forthcoming token that will power its MMOG Life Beyond. One aspect that’s interesting is said token will be running on Bitcoin, which caused some surprise when it was announced in September as up-to-that-point Life Beyond had been a fairly standard web3 game with its NFTs on Polygon.
As for the investors, they’re a mix of Animoca-adjacent funds — Darewise is owned by Animoca Brands — and crypto degens. The former include Animoca Ventures, Yat Siu and Gamefi Ventures, while the latter South Korean outfit Blocore, Citizen Capital (part of the NEO Tokyo DAO) and London Real Ventures, who are - well — real weird.
German game dev Zeedz has launched its mobile climate change-focused NFT game Zeedz via Apple App Store (Google Play expected shortly), alongside the announcement of a $1 million seed round from the celebrity investors on Die Hohle der Lowen, Germany’s version of the Shark Tank.
Available in a standard F2P version or with NFTs on the Flow blockchain — priced from $70 — players plant and nuture Zeedle characters, also teaming up to fight enemies. The game has a strong green theme with Zeedles being planted on a world map. Each requires specific conditions to grow and the game integrates real-time weather for that purpose.
In addition, 10% of Zeedz's revenue as a company and 50% of NFT trading fees will be spent on green projects via The Gold Standard charity.
The Sandbox Ramps Up news
Further to the news that ex-Sony and Apple executive Nicola Sebastiani has joined The Sandbox as its new chief content officer comes the titbit that the metaverse project has now clocked up 4.5 million registered users. That’s up from the 2 million figure provided at the end of 2022.
Available in a rolling form of open beta since early 2022, various experiences are always live for players, but The Sandbox itself is yet to fully open in terms of allowing players to experience all the games built inside it. However, it has promised that all NFT land owners will be able to publish their own experiences before the end of 2023.
More generally, The Sandbox claims it’s working with more than 400 brand and IP partners, >200 agencies, >100 game studios and >20 educational partners.
Big Time Big Sale new
Plenty of eyes on Big Time at present. Its token launch seems to be holding up relatively well; down 43% from the all-time-high but up 260% from the initial tracking price on CoinGecko. Obvs early days!
And it’s also worth noting that it’s managed to sell $750,000-worth of gacha item boxes in mere minutes, which hopefully suggests decent playerbase appetite and not just degen speculation. Access to the game is opening up but still controlled by a waitlist.
Additional Links
Alien Worlds has introduced a 24 hour cooldown for mining rewards. It will be interesting to see how this impacts its DAUWs going forward.
Animoca-owned Forj has opened its Ape Accelerator to help build out the ApeCoin ecosystem with new apps and games.
Immutable is locking 125 million of its IMX tokens until at least July 2024.
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