Apologises for the lack of an email yesterday. I was talking at the Manchester Blockchain Meetup and — as ever — a 15 minute presentation proved much longer to craft than expected.
I think it ended up okay, though.
It was entitled: The Future of (Blockchain) Games.
TL;DW: The growth of the games industry over the past decade — both in terms of player numbers and revenue — came from F2P games so to succeed in a similar way, blockchain game developers are going to have to work out how to give away assets for free and let their players work out what is valuable and how much to pay for it.
The era of developers setting prices for their assets and then watching the community leave when prices go down has to end.
Indeed, this free attitude is already what we’re seeing from the likes of Nexon with its MapleStory Universe and from DigiDaigaku developer Limit Break, which has also announced it’s just acquired FreeNFT.
FreeNFT reminds me of FreeAppADay, a clever marketing service for paid mobile games which thrived in the early 2010s.
The process was that paid games would sign up for a marketing slot in FAAD and then set their typically 99c price on the App Store to free for a day. FAAD would promote this on its website and app and then the developer would reset the price to 99c, driving revenue from the massive organic download boost they’d received by going free in the first place.
It wasn’t subtle, but it was extremely effective, for awhile.
Obviously the model doesn’t work in the same way for NFTs, but the idea of building up a massive discovery funnel for people who are interested in free NFTs — and who are prepared to perform viral marketing tasks for a higher chance of getting those free NFTs — makes total sense
And the significant additional element in terms of Limit Break’s involvement is the way in which it hopes to use FreeNFT alongside its new smart contract tech, which enforces royalty/pricing, and which also allows for stronger interoperability options between projects.
Limit Break has already experimented with such interactions — DigiDaigaku Genesis NFT holders were airdropped NFTs to play Castaways and EtherOrcs — but I don’t think this really worked very well. EtherOrcs since went bust.
It should be much easier — and scalable — to drive deeper synergies using a platform such as FreeNFT, however.
As ever, Gabe Leydon explains it all in a big Twitter thread, which is worth reading.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: investing in free-to-play games since 2018
Funding Funders news
It’s being reported that Singapore degen DeFiance Capital has raised around $50 million of what it hopes will eventually be a $100 million fund targeting under-valued tokens.
DeFiance was originally closely linked to failed hedge fund 3AC and has invested in over 20 blockchain game projects including Merit Circle, Ember Sword, Blast Royale, Civitas, Shrapnel and AFAR, while also leading rounds for Nyan Heroes, Solice and GuildFi.
Funding news
Tilia, the payment network spun out of Second Life, has confirmed it’s raised $22 million. This is split between a previously announced round in October 2022 from JP Morgan Chase and new funding from Dunamu, which is the South Korean company behind the Upbit crypto exchange.
As well as running payments for Second Life, Tilia also works with the likes of mobile blockchain game Upland, handling fiat payments and digital assets. It has money transmitter licenses for every US state and uses JP Morgan as its banking partner.
Not Giving Away NFTs news
Despite my growing thoughts around “giving away stuff for free”, a couple of games are currently in selling mode. Petaverse has just launched its first NFT drop with vouchers for your first genesis cat priced at 0.15 ETH ($250).
Meanwhile Chainmonsters’ island land sale on IMX has started with 500 land boxes available at 0.12 ETH, plus 2,000 mystery boxes, which include five random NFTs, for 0.03 ETH ($50).
Nation Of Million news
Good to see UK developer Fumb Games has reported that 12-months-on from its crypto-enabled reboot, Bitcoin Miner — its idle mobile game — has now broken the one million downloads mark.
Using the Zebedee payment platform to reward players with very small amounts of Bitcoin via the Lightning network, Bitcoin Miner is a great way to get into earning crypto in a simple manner. Download it here — Play Store, App Store.
Mocaverse x Apes news
Mocaverse has announced that Animoca Brands has donated 1.5 million APE tokens — worth $6.6 million — into its MocaApe.eth multisig wallet. This will be used for the Mocaverse community to vote on proposals in the ApeCoin DAO, where Animoca chairman Yat Siu is a founder member.
The tokens are not part of Mocaverse treasury, however. Instead it’s an example of how other projects will be able to collaborate with what Animoca hopes will become a thriving community of like-minded NFT enthusiasts.
In other news, pre-reveal — which happens on Friday 17th March — the floor price of Mocaverse NFTs has dropped to 1 ETH.
Anipang NFT news
I’ve spent some time looking into this project — not sure I fully understand it — but top South Korean casual mobile franchise Anipang has released its 1,000-strong Anipang Supporter Club NFT collection on Ethereum to what looks like immediate success. From a free mint, the NFTs now have a floor price of 0.6 ETH, and the collection has already done over $400,000 of trading volume.
As for the overall project, it appears that under the label Anipang Club, three web3-enabled mobile games in the franchise — Anipang Match, Anipang Blast and Anipang Coins — will be released via app stores, alongside some form of tokenization which links into the Wemix blockchain. The original web2 games were published by Wemade, which also runs Wemix.
In this content, the Anipang Supporter Club acts a ticket to future NFT mints as well as rewarding holders with tokens. That sounds like a security to me, but hey!
Additional Links
Why doesn’t Epic Games Store have profiles yet? "It’s like a metaverse kind of thing that will connect to the Epic Games Store and Fortnite and other things that we haven’t announced yet".
Epic Game Store does, however, have around 20 thirdparty blockchain games in its approval process for eventual release.
NounsDAO has passed a proposal to release $125,000 to make the first part of what it hopes will be full-length animated movie
Salesforce now supports NFTs.
A CS:GO skin just sold for $160,000 and even Kotaku reported it neutrally.
Have you installed crypto security layer Stelo for Metamask yet?