Ronin dominates onchain game activity
But other chains are also growing
As the year comes to an end, it seems that the action is hotting up, at least when it comes to onchain activity from the most popular blockchain games.
As ever, Pixels remains the #1 game on this basis, rising from a couple of days being as low as 250,000 daily active unique wallets at the start of November, to over 400,000 by the start of December.
It was joined by fellow Ronin-based title Lumiterra, although it’s important to note that the PC MMORPG is currently on its second closed beta test so its onchain activity is likely much higher than it would be when formally live thanks to FOMO and token incentives etc.
Other games on Ronin that are demonstrating growth include:
Wild Forest, which is now very close to its token launch,
The Machines Arena, which is in its play-to-airdrop Season 2, and
Axie Infinity, which is still growing thanks to various token-based incentives.
As with Lumiterra, it’s not clear how well these games would perform if these incentives were removed or toned down. But it’s worth pointing out that Axie Infinity and Wild Forest’s growth has been sustained for the past six months and more.
Of course, Ronin isn’t the only gaming blockchain and in terms of more recent growth, the two titles to point out are console shooter Off The Grid, which runs on its own Avalanche-based Gunz chain, and 4X mobile game Age of Dino, which runs on the Xterio chain, based on BNB.
Both are currently attracting over 200,000 daily active unique wallets.
As for other gaming chains, we are now also starting to see some stats from titles on Immutable’s zkEVM chain.
As it often tells us, there are apparently over 300 titles to be released for it but very few of them have reached formal release.
Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain is currently into its second play-to-airdrop season in collaboration with Game7, but this hasn’t been as successful as the initial season, with activity down from over 150,000 DAUWs to around 75,000 DAUs.
Immutable’s own mobile RPG Guild of Guardians has continued its longterm decline, at least in terms of onchain activity — from a peak of 15,000 at launch in May, now to under 4,000 DAUWs.
However, the launch of mobile idle RPG Immortal Rising 2 is a brighter spot. It’s just launched its IMT token play-to-airdrop event and has seen strong uptake with over 75,000 DAUWs hit in a matter of days.
The final graph in this email is more experimental: something I’ll have to work on further in terms of double-checking the data for the end of year report.
Nevertheless, I think it does paint an interesting picture about the growth of blockchain gaming over the past couple of years.
Obviously, one reason for the growth as captured in this type of cumulative daily activity is that there are just more games now. This data doesn’t attempt to filter for uniqueness. Individual wallets interacting with multiple games on a daily basis would all be counted as unique, so there is certainly a lot of double and triple (etc) counting.
Nevertheless, the shift from early 2022 when the only sizable games were Splinterlands, Alien Worlds and Axie Infinity to the start of the current growth cycle in late 2023 with the launch of Pixels is clear to see.
The other obvious trend is the amount of blue in 2024, which is all the gaming activity from Ronin; around 50% of the total in terms of this crude rule-of-thumb, but please note — double and triple counting!
Hopefully I’ll be able to mitigate some of this late in December.
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Calendar
Wild Forest WF token pre-sale starts — 5th December
Faraway’s NFT-enabled PC FPS Shatterline goes live — 5th December
Tribally’s TGE and community airdrop on Base — 5th December
Illuvium’s G-Shock collab NFTs go live — 9th December
Play’s (ex-Readygg) PLAY token goes live — 10th December
Eden Games’ Cosmic Royale PC kart racer goes live — 12th December
Avalanche’s 9000 upgrade goes live — 16th December
The Sandbox Alpha Season 4 ends — 17th December
Final date to lock GMT for MGMA token burn — 20th January 2025.
Rough House + Overworld = Reach news
I think we’re going to see a lot more of such consolidation in 2025, but getting ahead of the curve, Overworld and Rough House Games have announced they are joining forces and launching a combined entity called Reach Labs.
As a quick reprise, Rough House Games was originally the web3 arm of mobile game publisher Jam City. It split out from Jam City in 2023 as Plai Labs, but this ended up focusing on AI tech, and so Rough House Games then split out from Plai Labs.
It’s been working on combat RPG Champions Ascension since 2022, also spawning the Keystone Protocol, which is described as being:
“a decentralized social network technology enabling true social virality, to provide a secure economic infrastructure to democratize distribution by empowering and rewarding players, creators, and communities to gather around games they love”.
As for Overworld, it’s part of the Xterio ecosystem, which was heavily funded by Chinese mobile publisher FunPlus and South Korean VC Hashed.
It’s working on a number of titles including an action RPG for PC and consoles codenamed Conquest, and a free-to-play strategy mobile game called Kingdoms.
Reach Labs will combine marketing synergies for these games, and also look to build a wider ecosystem with other developers.
Additional Links
Off The Grid didn’t rank in the top 100 most streamed games in November.
Wild Forest has launched mystic units, which cost 400 WF tokens plus the burning of four of the equivalent legendary units.
Decentralised.co has launched SentientMarketCap for all your AI agent needs.
73% of Moca users who were airdropped CHAMP tokens are still holding them, with 22% staking them.
OG MMORPG Tibia is allowing users to convert its in-game Tibia Coins currency to the Tibia Token on BNB.
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