The week of reboot
Love and rockets
Top 300 Blockchain Games Index: ⬇️2% today, ⬇️30% YTD
Ronin Games Index: ⬆️2% today, ⬇️42% YTD
AI Gaming Agents: ⬆️35% today, ⬇️10% YTD
Ex-Guilds Index: 0% today, ⬇️42% YTD
Jon’s Fave Games Index: 0% today, ⬇️37% YTD
The week started badly when I had to reschedule a podcast because my internet was so patchy. Cue a new PC and upgrade to my wifi nodes. Let’s hope it all works properly on Monday.
The good news arising was that lots of games that hadn’t previously worked well on a 2022-era PC started working much better.
But the other bad news was I spent a long time importing wallets and working out which emails and Telegram accounts were no long recoverable because I didn’t have access to old phone numbers.
Still, the other good good news is that I am now rebooting my old The Sandbox Daily YouTube account. Started in 2020 and dropped in 2021, perhaps now is the time to ramp up.
Actually I’ve been pretty impressed with some aspects of the platform, while also being amazed how other aspects seem to remain fundamentally broken.
It’s going to be a fascinating journey to work out which will dominate in 2025.
Looking more generally at the world of blockchain gaming, the big news this week was Ronin going permissionless. This means a lot of newish games will become available on the blockchain, so it will be crucial to see if this grows its overall audience, or if the current audience just get more things to do.
To contextualize, after a solid first half of 2024, daily activity on Ronin has now dropped 75% from its 52-week high so it will be very easy to see if opening up the chain is effective or not.
In other news, Blockchain Gaming World #191 saw me talking to TreasureDAO’s Karel Vuong about the self-styled “decentralized gaming console”, and how Vuong thinks its combination of cooperative indie developers, bottom-up community and strong technical tooling will allow it to flourish as projects take advantage of its new Treasure Chain, which is based on ZKsync.
A bit like The Sandbox, I’ve always hoped there would be a game on Treasure that really caught my attention. Nothing to-date but I like what’s brewing in terms of AI agents for the Smolworld project, so maybe that will be the opportunity to jump in — although probably not via a new YouTube channel!
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Weekly News round
Ronin is incentivizing NFT trading with $100,000 prize pool.
Immutable-based MMORPG RavenQuest launching 14th March.
Treasure unveils gaming focused AI agent platform Mage.
The Sandbox allows builders to access brands such as The Smurfs and Care Bears.
Lawsuit freezes 450 million PLAY tokens.
Somnia and Uprising Labs launch $10 million game accelerator.
Starknet partners with Ubisoft on educational web3 program.
Stepn dev FSL launches FSL Game Hub on Telegram.
Delabs Games launches Boxing Star X via Telegram and Line.
TON adds LayerZero’s cross-chain protocol.
As discussed below:
Additional Links
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer on OpenSea v2 and the SEA token launch.
Gam3Girl has made a strategic investment into YGG by buying tokens from the open market. YGG tokens are down 47% in price over the past 12 months.
WolvesDAO will be airdropping its WOOF token to the “most rugged crypto gaming wallets”.
If you’re not using LLMs for something every day, you’re doing it wrong.
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