The rise of Immutable+Polygon
Outworking of 2023's cooperation deal
We kicked off the week looking at Mighty Bear Game’s new Goat Gaming initiative.
Launching with the studio’s existing battle royale game Mighty Action Heroes, Goat Gaming is a platform in which players can play head-to-head wagered battles; something that has launched with the Showdown Battle mode in Mighty Action Heroes.
However, following a chat with Mighty Bear’s CEO Simon Davis, it’s clear that the vision for Goat Gaming goes much wider, also taking into account the developer’s existing activities making content for Fortnite via UEFN, as well as viral mini-games on Telegram, all accelerated by its AI production tools.
This ability to generate a lot of content will provide a wide marketing funnel, which will eventually feed into Goat Gaming, engaging players with various rewards including crypto — such as the forthcoming GOAT token — but also more traditional real-world rewards too.
There will also be a bunch of new games that Mighty Bear is working on so something to look forward to as more details arise in the coming weeks.
For the remainder of the week, I’ve been working on various graphs using data from the Big Blockchain Game List for the forthcoming Big Blockchain Game Report Q2.
The headline trend from these is the rise of Immutable zkEVM as the blockchain with the most publicly announced games live and in development.
This isn’t really a surprise as twelve months ago Polygon and Immutable agreed to cooperate, with Polygon pushing all its games to use Immutable’s platform, and Immutable integrating the platform to run exclusively on the Polygon zkEVM blockchain, albeit using IMX as its gas token.
At that point, Polygon (12%) and Immutable (5%) combined accounted for 17% of all games tracked on the list.
And indeed Polygon (6%) and Immutable (11%) still account for 17% of all 994 games tracked, although if you also breakout our Multichain category and consider the number of games in total deploying on each blockchain (1,294 games), their combined total is now 25%.
This trend is also reflected in terms of newly announced games with Immutable accounting for 16% and Polygon (still going) with 5%.
However — as previously discussed at some length — Immutable actually claims many more games than we can publicly check; now more than 330.
Looking at the Immutable website, it appears that some of these are games that have since been discontinued while others are projects that we don’t consider games. But there remains a significant number we can only assume have yet to be announced.
More importantly perhaps is that games are now going live on Immutable zkEVM with Guild of Guardians, Hunters On-Chain, Shardbound, MetalCore and Illuvium being the signature titles hoping to do for the blockchain what Pixels has done for its arch-rival gaming blockchain Ronin.
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Weekly News roundup
Sky Mavis’ Jeff Zirlin says web3 gaming isn’t dead, but thriving.
‘Set expectations and don’t over-promise’: Pixels’ CMO Heidi Christine on building a strong web3 community.
Shardbound launches open beta via Epic Games Store on 27th June.
Ubisoft’s RPG Champions Tactics minting in-game NFTs from 15th July.
Netmarble is migrating its Marblex platform to Immutable.
Ronin welcomes Lumiterra, its first open world survival MMORPG.
Crypto Unicorns goes live on Arbitrum L3 Xai.
Gaming L3 Xai welcomes cyberpunk MMO Yaku.
The Sandbox’s 1.5 million SAND Builders’ Challenge 2 now live.
Wild Forest introduces Forge function for burning beta NFTs.
Sequence integrates Transak’s on-ramp payment system.
As discussed below, including a brain dump from me about whether Sky Mavis is now flogging a dead horse with Axie Infinity — shouldn’t it just be Ronin-based interoperable NFT collection?
Equity Swap news
Personally I’m not sure that equity swaps ever make much sense, even for mature companies. Nevertheless these are things that some companies do and in this case Animoca Brands has announced it’s signed a MoU for a $5 million equity swap with Futureverse; the New Zealand-founded 11-company rollup that leaned heavy into metaverse, rebranding from its original Centrality name in 2022, also raising $54 million. It’s since also highlighted its genAI capabilities, although to be fair one of those companies in the group is Altered State Machine, which has always been a highly experimental AI-focused outfit.
From Animoca’s point-of-view, it says the strategic partnerships will see it growing Futureverse’s “advanced metaverse technology stack” by leveraging it through the over 400 web3 consumer-facing web3 companies in which it’s invested. It will also plug it into the Mocaverse.
Futureverse lists its suite of tools thus:
Pass — a digital passport,
DOT — a digital asset creation tool,
Swappables and Wearables Engine — another asset creation tool,
DOC - a text-to-3D genAI tool,
JEN — an “ethically-trained” text-to-music platform.
On top of these, Futureverse has its Root blockchain — which has just celebrated its first NFT mint: PorkJet — its AI protocol using the ASTO token, social graph token SYLO, plus its The Readyverse, which is “bringing the Ready Player One franchise to the metaverse”. Frankly, I’m breathless just writing about it all.
As for what Futureverse gets out of the token swap, the fact that the deal publicly values it at $754 million is likely not immaterial.
Pixels Bot news
It’s something I need to double-check in more depth, but it looks like the launch of Pixels’ chapter 2 has tanked its DAUW count, most likely because it was designed to redirect rewards towards active players, and hence some players and mainly bots have stopped playing.
But whatever the reason, the DAUW count has dropped significantly from a peak of around 850,000 to 385,000.
Boomlands NFT Trading news
About to surpass Guild of Guardians!
Additional Links
MetalCore launched its MGC token: down 50% today.
But you can buy a MetalCore key to play the closed beta from packs ranging in price from $30 to $500.
73% of $PORTAL tokens were sold on the first day of the airdrop.
Card-based RPG Legend of Arcadia has launched its month-long The Grandia World Tour event.
Treasure-based game The Beacon minted out 10,000 NFTs, raising $3.9 million.
Check out the Big Blockchain Game Report Q1 2024 👀 here or 👀 via PDF.