Pixels falls but Boomland booms

June's player (and bot) data

The good news is DappRadar has completed its update and historical data is now back online, albeit with some patchy periods for Ronin.

The bad news is I had to do my regular set of graphs looking at June’s performance, so more delays to the Q2 report!

Nevertheless, I think having this data — including for some new games — is worth the wait.

Of course, the biggest news of June remains Pixels’ dropping 69% of its daily activity with its chapter 2 release “breaking the bots” and taking its DAUW count down to 250,000; albeit now back to over 400,000.

As previously discussed, when looking at the historic experiences of games such as Splinterlands and Alien Worlds, I don’t think this sort of rebasing is a bug, more a feature arising from blockchain games enabling the extraction of value and hence attracting lots of bots.

Whenever the reward equilibrium is shifted, you get a high level of volatility. Of course, the question of how actively a project wants (or needs) to crack down on bots is a deeper discussion point.

Aside from Pixels, the big news from June is the early success Boomland has experienced building out its ecosystem, with total wallets now over 150,000 DAUWs.

The largest proportion of this activity is driven by the mobile/browser game Hunters On-Chain, which is halfway through its month-long play-to-airdrop campaign. The remainder comes from UA experimentation, onboarding gamers from two web2 games — Archery Club and Car Driving School — which have been lightly blockchain-enhanced via the ecosystem’s BGEM utility token.

It’s also worth pointing out the rise of TON tap-to-earn game Catizen, with 100,000 DAUWs, although it claims 10 million wallets. It’s unclear to me why there is such a divergence. Probably it’s something to do with TON’s bot-heavy environment and which blockchain interactions DappRadar is actually tracking.

That aside, assuming 1% of any TON game’s quoted audience is ‘real’ feels like a decent rule of thumb.

For me, however, the most interesting trend during June was the early performance of some newly launched via-app-store mobile games such as Guild of Guardians and Wild Forest.

Guild of Guardians launched on 15th May, peaking at over 15,000 DAUWs, since falling back somewhat. In terms of blockchain activity, DappRadar is likely tracking players minting and burning character NFTs, as NFT trading is external to the app — via web — and would be included in the activity for whatever marketplace on which it’s happening.

Immutable announced Guild of Guardians has generated 613,000 downloads to-date and had 250,000 MAUs (during its launch month) so 15,000 daily active wallets feels about right.

In comparison, Wemade’s PC/mobile MMORPG Wild Crows now has around 9,0000 DAUWs from over 350,000 daily active users, a rate of 3% which is low as the game’s blockchain features are gated by player progression: they don’t unlock until level 35. The spikes likely arise from the short periods when the game’s CROW token can be minted.

Ronin-based RTS Wild Forest is preparing for its token launch with a play-to-airdrop campaign that’s starting to see some growth; it’s now over 15,000 DAUWs.

But Delabs’ PC and mobile kart racer Rumble Racing Star was the best performer of this newbies group. Again, it’s been running a play-to-airdrop campaign that generated over 20,000 DAUWs for much of May and June.

As for how many bots are involved in all this, we are yet to find out!

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Calendar

• MOCA token claim goes live — 11th July

• Mojo Melee launches its summer surge campaign — 11th July

• Champions Tactics mints in-game NFTs — 15th July

• Xociety runs its next playtest — 15th July

• Chromia mainnet goes live — 16th July

• WEMIX day — 16th July

• Hunters On-Chain’s play-to-airdrop campaign ends — 24th July

• MapleStory Universe’s Pioneer testing starts — 24th July

• Forgotten Runiverse closed beta event on Ronin — 31st July

• Illuvium goes live — 25th July

Funding news

• Another example of a metaverse rollup to file in the docket marked “interesting valuations”, US outfit Infinite Reality — staff 140 — has acquired UK-based LandVault — staff 36; itself a weird rollup/merger of game adtech outfit Admix and buzzy metaverse services startup LandVault in 2022. That original merger saw LandVault valued at $300 million, while Infinite Reality has now paid $450 million … in equity.

The rub is that Infinite Reality, which says it is “redefining the infinite possibilities of connected digital environments in the modern age”, is currently attempting to get its SPAC listing with Nasdaq company Newbury Street Acquisition — first announced in December 2022 — over the line.

In the meantime, Infinite Reality has also announced a $350 million investment from an unnamed “private multi family office”, which values it at a rather large $5.1 billion; up from $2.5 billion quoted in February 2024.

Prior to the LandVault deal, Infinite Reality had spent around $350 million, acquiring The Drone Racing League and various tools including Ethereal Engine and Action Face.

BCGW # 174 news

• After a couple of weeks break, I’m back to a weekly podcast schedule, kicking off with an interesting discussion with ArenaX Labs’ COO Wei Xie about the company’s approach to AI for blockchain and gaming.

Of course, in these days of ChatGPT it’s important to point out that ArenaX isn’t using genAI. Instead it’s what Xie labels its reinforced machine learning platform, with the reinforcement being provided by a human-in-the-loop.

This is certainly the case for the forthcoming AI Arena game in which players control the basic inputs to their character, who then auto-fights in a PVP arena. The success of this activity will itself be reinforced by the just-launched NRN token, which will be used to reward players and build gaming guilds/esport teams.

However, ArenaX has another aspect of its vision, which is a b2b platform called Sai. Using the same highly optimized and lightweight ML code — Xei notes that the cost of operating an AI platform is often overlooked — Sai is designed for AI professionals and educators.

For, synergy between the two products will be key, with Xie hoping that the best players of AI Arena will take the opportunity to further investigate AI, potentially getting jobs in a sector that is crying out for new talent, particularly talent sourced from non-academic communities.

Migrating To Ronin news

• The latest game to announce it’s migrating to Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain is F2P pixel MMORPG Forgotten Runiverse. Based on the Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult NFTs, it was originally operating on the Arbitrum blockchain, with the original 9,300 character NFTs (floor $1,700) minted on Ethereum in 2021, and since followed by a 70,000-strong land set in 2023.

Developers Bisonic and Magic Machine are currently working to release the F2P game via Epic Games Store later in 2024, with a mobile version also in the works. The Ronin launch will kick off with a closed beta on 31st July, followed by a public gameplay event in August.

Designed around collaborative play, Forgotten Runiverse encourages players to form guilds and embark on PvE expeditions and PvP battles, while gathering resources and crafting items to boost their power.

Find out more at the Runiverse website.