One year on from the formal(ish) launch of the Big Blockchain Game List — also follow it on Twitter and web — and it’s time for an update.
At time of writing, we’re tracking 807 live and in-development projects, with a further 93 now parked in the Discontinued tab.
In terms of headline data, BNB, Ethereum, Polygon and Solana have maintained their top positions with roughly 10% of projects deployed on each.
When it comes to chasing pack of gaming-focused infrastructure, the big change has been the arrival of Wemade’s Wemix — which has recently revealed dozens of live and in-development titles, mainly because it’s retrofitting blockchain to existing web2 games.
Immutable X, Avalanche, Gala Games, Oasys and Ronin are all in various stages of building out their own ecosystem plays too and this is where the significant competition will arise in the coming months.
Non-EVM chains such as WAX and FLOW appear to be falling away, although it will be interesting to see if new chains in this sector such as Sui and Aptos gain any traction during 2023.
For the first time, we’ve also attempted a breakdown of game genres.
This is difficult as the way many blockchain games describe themselves is not always logical in terms of game genres as traditionally defined.
Still, we’ve done our best to combine everything down to a workable number of genres: no doubt we’ll finesse this analysis in the coming months.
Unsuprisingly, genres such as RPGs and strategy rank high, not only because these are hardcore genres but because these games generally contain a lot of in-game assets and deep economies which nominally can be mapped to NFTs and tokens.
The same is true for TCG, although at 5%, there are perhaps fewer of them than I originally thought.
The relatively high number of ‘Casual’ games is in part a consequence of the main subgenres it encompasses, everything from puzzle and match-3 to farming and pets.
Sports are also well represented, notably soccer management games and move-to-earn-style rewarded fitness apps.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: Open to all gaming genres!
Mocaverse Redux news
After two and a half hours of getting stuck on various pages of the Mocaverse mint site I gave up and went to sleep … for five hours … and then woke up and completed the mint in about 20 minutes.
Obviously, there’s plenty of grief floating around Crypto Twitter on this subject about which I have little to add to yesterday’s view that having the most streamlined mint process possible is always best.
Any friction in the flow — and Mocaverse had lots of nice ideas about customizing your NFT, which added a lot of friction — just causes problems.
Still, it looks like most people have now minted their allocation and with a floor price of 1.7 ETH for unrevealed characters which were either a free or a 0.138 ETH mint, anyone really annoyed about the experience can sell out and make $2,500.
Now comes the hard part for Animoca, however, as it looks to overcome these launch memories as it implements the wider vision for its Mocaverse ecosystem.
Funding news
US mobile game developer Redemption has announced it’s bought itself back from AppLovin; also raising $7 million which was led by Play Ventures. Bitkraft, Merit Circle and Orange DAO also participated.
The story is a convoluted one. It was created by ex-Jam City execs Michael Witz and Dan Lin, who co-founded Redemption in 2015 with backing from Scopely, which signed up its first two games including the never-released Temple Run: Treasure Hunters — which I played a lot in soft launch. Then Supercell invested $5 million and Redemption released match-3 puzzler Sweet Escapes before AppLovin stepped in and acquired the company.
Now, however, the newly-independent Redemption is working on something midcore in web3 — hence the particular involvement of Merit Circle and Orange DAO — as well as continuing to operate Sweet Escape and working on another web2 mobile puzzle title.
Wemade Goes Big At GDC news
South Korean publisher Wemade is going all-out to talk up its Wemix gaming blockchain at GDC. It’s a diamond sponsor of the conference and providing the following content:
CEO Henry Chang talking about expanding in-game economies into ecosystems via tokenomics,
EVP Wonil Suh on lessons learned from launching +25 blockchain games
Head of business creative centre Robin Seo on turning web2 into web3 games, plus
Filipino cosplay influencer Myrtle Abigail Sarrosa discussing her Wemix-based fan token.
Sui’s Dark Materials news
Thirdperson dark fantasy RPG Abyss World has been announced as one of the first games on Mysten Labs’ Sui blockchain. In development since 2020 from indie team Metagame Industries — who I think are Chinese — there’s plenty of information in the whitepaper, but very little detail about the team or how they plan to fulfil their ambitious Dark Souls’-esque vision.
Still you can already add it to your Steam wishlist prior to an expected open beta in Q3 2023.
Square Enix Countdown news
Square Enix’s first NFT experience Symbiogenesis is launching its teaser site and Discord on Thursday 9th March at 3am UTC/12pm JST. It looks like there will be some playable offchain content as well as more details about the project’s schedule, notably its NFT drop.
More Illuvium news
Immutable is launching the assets for Illuvium: Beyond — its new TCG — at 10pm today (Tuesday 7th March). Illuvium: Beyond is the fourth game in the Illuvium ecosystem, which includes PC open world title Illuvium: Homeworld, mobile resource collector Illuvium: Zero and original autochess battler Illuvium: Arena.
In terms of the launch, players will be able to buy D1SKS, which include two Illuvitar characters of varying rarities and three accessories.
Prices start at 0.025 ETH (c.$40) for a standard D1SK (100,000 total supply) and 0.125 ETH (c.$200) for a Mega D1SK (20,000 total supply). As well as ETH, you can also pay using Illuvium’s own sILV2 token.
Obviously all this activity will occur on the Immutable X blockchain. Funds raised will be sent to a Safety Pool that will sustain the game’s DAO.
Additional Links
More rumormill on Amazon NFTs, which are now said to be focused around generating digital versions of real-world objects.
The auction for Yuga Labs’ BTC-based 300-strong Ordinal NFT collection Twelvefold generated $16.5 million in primary sales.
Have you installed crypto security layer Stelo for Metamask yet?