Polygon strengthens as BNB and Solana's gaming importance fades
Big Blockchain Game List data from H1 2023
More great work from fine folks at the Big Blockchain Game List, who have been crunching and collating the sector’s H1 2023 data and come up with some interesting trends
First up is looking at the breakdown of all the games that have every been listed — 1024 in total — in terms of their development status.
What we’re seeing — and expect to see more of over time — is more games being discontinued, both driven by market conditions and the usual cycle of depredation. In this case, the share of discontinued games has risen by 2% to 23%, compared to Q1 2023’s total.
The largest category for blockchain games remains “in development”, although there is some debate as to exactly when a blockchain game goes “live”.
Looking at discontinued games in more detail, the ecosystem that has been hit hardest is BNB, which accounts of 16% of discontinued games.
Ethereum and Polygon are at 11%, while Solana is at 10%, which is a relatively high percentage given that Solana trails the previously mentioned blockchains in terms of absolute number of titles — see the next graph.
In turn, these trends are reflected in which blockchains are most popular for games. Previously BNB was the #1 chain but this has changed given the number of BNB titles that have been discontinued.
Broadly speaking, games on BNB have been focused on the Asian market and use what’s labelled as GameFi mechanics — i.e. being gamified DeFi — rather than primarily being designed as games. They have also tended to be developed by less experienced and well-capitalized studios.
The result is the Polygon is now the most popular single blockchain for gaming, althought Multichain — that is games deploying on one or more blockchains — is the single largest category.
Another trend worth highlighting is the number of blockchains — both L1s and L2s — in the 2-5% range. Notably the likes of Immutable, WEMIX, Gala, Oasys and Ronin are specifically designed to be gaming blockchains. Most of these ecosystems are also run by single companies. For example Ronin is run by Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis and WEMIX by South Korean publisher Wemade.
For those interested in the color scheme used in the graph, it’s a subtle guide to whether the blockchains are compatible with Ethereum or not.
Since Q1 2023, the proportion of games running on such EVM-compatible blockchains has increased by 8%, partly as Solana has declined, with the likes of Sui and Aptos not looking as if they are very game-focused.
The final graph considers which blockchains have added the most new titles in H1 2023. Wemade’s WEMIX is #1 as it looks to have 60 live web3 mainly mobile games by the end of 2023, closely followed by Polygon.
BNB’s weakness can be seen in the relative lack of new games being added.
Non-EVM chains continue to perform weakly as an overall category too, especially given rising activity from more scalable EVM chains such as Immutable, Oasys and Arbitrum.
The Big Blockchain Game List is updated monthly so don’t forget to regularly check it out via web and Twitter.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in the future of gaming
Calendar
Mojo Melee launches Season 1 — 6th July
Netmarble vote on new token burn proposal — 10th July
Xociety launches its Frontier NFT collection — 10th July
Arc8 launches League Season 0 via 555 NFTs — 11th July
Let’s meet at Gamescom — 23-24th August
Do Sweat It news
Move-to-earn project Sweat Economy has announced the launch of Sweat Heroes, its in-app game and NFT experience.
Using its existing Sweat wallet — which is the crypto element of its Sweatcoin ecosystem — players can convert the SWEAT tokens they already earn through daily steps into NFTs, which are levelled up and can be minted on-chain. These NFTs legs will be dynamic and change based on users’ gameplay progression, physical activity, and engagement within the Sweat wallet app.
Crucially these NFTs will also act a sink for the SWEAT token, which up-to-this-point has only had staking functionality and real-world prize lotteries. Now SWEAT can be converted into Battle Coins, which are spent in tap rhythm PVP battles against other NFTs, with the winners gaining more SWEAT. In future, Sweat Economy plans to launch seven arenas, by which players can level up and gain higher rewards.
To-date, Sweat Wallet has over 6 million users, although the SWEAT token has dropped 89% since its launch in September 2022.
Additional Links
Animoca Brands has signed a strategic alliance with 4x4 shooter Farcana, which runs on Arbitrum Nova.
The Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 has announced its Inter-World Portaling System (IWPS) project and published its litepaper.
CryptoKitties is finally making its “first steps on Flow”. Maybe that’s why the Flow token price is up 49% in the past 2 weeks.
Earn Wheelcoin by walking, cycling or taking the bus
A bit of both. Certainly we haven't seen any momentum in terms of games announcing they are deploying on Sui and Aptos. You may have better information than me in terms of specifics. Even so I'd suggest the term "very heavy focus gaming" is over exaggerated!
Do you think Sui and Aptos really aren't focused on gaming? or is the comment more so that nothing has born fruit for them yet and thus hard to put them in that category?
Everything I've seen and heard out of both of those camps indicates are very heavy focus on gaming