Take stock of the development status of chain games on each public chain: Binance Chain has the most projects, and Wax has the most active ecology
Games occupy an important proportion in various blockchain applications. Although it is currently in a bear market, the total daily activity of wallets for games on the blockchain will still reach 800,000 in the fourth quarter of 2022, accounting for 43% of the total number of daily active wallets in the entire blockchain. % .
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Data source dappradar.com, organized by PANews
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Chain game public chain: three points in the world, Wax has the highest DAU
From the perspective of the total number of game projects: currently the top three in the total number of blockchain games are Binance Chain, Ethereum and Polygon, and the blockchain games on these three public chains account for 76.2% of the total
Data source: footprint.network, compiled by PANews
From the perspective of game project growth:Before 2021, games on Ethereum accounted for about 75% of all games, but from the second half of 2021, the number of games on Binance Chain, Polygon and Wax Chain has achieved significant growth, while the number of games on Ethereum has remained stable. Unchanged, standing still.
Data source dappradar.com
Daily Active Wallet AddressesIt is an important indicator to measure the activity of blockchain applications, and also a key indicator to measure blockchain games. The wallet address directly interacts with the game smart contract, and the activity of a blockchain game can be judged by the daily activity of the game wallet.
Judging from the total number of daily active wallets in the game:As of December 2022, games on the Wax chain rank first with 340,000 daily activities, games on the Binance chain rank second with 110,000 daily activities, and Polygon ranks third with 74,000 daily activities.
Due to the impact of the FTX thunderstorm incident, Solana's game DAU dropped by 89.42% in November, from 20,000 DAU in October to 2,326 DAU in December. Top-ranked titles such as Atlas, Aurory and TapFantasy were the most affected.
The daily activity contribution of games on the Immutable X chain mainly comes from Gods Unchained, which has 2000 wallet daily activities. Another game, Guild of Guardians, is currently less active, with less than 100 daily activities. Another important game on Immutable X, Illuvium, has not yet online.
The daily activities of games on the Flow chain mainly come from Solitaire Blitz and Trickshot Blitz, with 4300 and 3500 daily activities respectively. The average daily activity of games on Avalanche is maintained at the level of several hundred daily activities. Another public chain, Hive, has a daily activity of 160,000, but it is worth noting that the daily activities of games on Hive mainly come from the game Splinterlands. In a sense, Splinterlands represents the Hive public chain. The number two game in total daily activity.
Data source dappradar.com, organized by PANews
Statistics from DappRadar show that among the top 10 game projects in daily wallet activity, 2 are from Wax, 2 from Binance Chain, 2 from Polygon, and 1 from Hive. The top 5 daily wallet games are from Wax, Hive and Polygon.
Data source dappradar.com, organized by PANews
Among the top 100 wallet address DAU games, 36 are from Wax, 23 are from Binance Chain, 18 are from Polygon, and game projects on public chains such as ETH, Solana, Immutable X, Flow, Avalanche, and Harmony All have only single digits.
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The ecological development of each public chain game
Ethereum: Ethereum is the birthplace of Gamefi, but due to bottlenecks such as high speed and high Gas fees, the number of games on its chain grows slowly, and the activity of game projects is also low. Before the first half of 2020, games on Ethereum accounted for most of the activity of blockchain games, but after the second half of 2020, the number of active games on Ethereum gradually decreased. Although the total number of games on Ethereum ranks second, there are very few active game projects, and the activity is basically replaced by game projects on Binance Chain, Polygon and other public chains, side chains, and second-layer networks. But Ethereum is also useless in games, because the game chain that uses the second-layer network of Ethereum also has credit for Ethereum. In addition, with the maturity of Ethereum 2.0 and sharding technology, it is believed that Ethereum will make a comeback.
Data source: footprint.network
Wax public chain:Wax was founded in 2017 by cryptocurrency pioneers William Quigley and Jonathan Yantis. In June 2022, Wax received a $10 million investment from OKX Blockdream Ventures to further develop its ecology. Wax's main direction is NFT and games. At present, WAX has become a popular NFT blockchain. Wax has achieved good results in 2022, attracting more than hundreds of thousands of unique active wallets and generating tens of millions of transactions every day. More than 100 Web3 games choose Wax to build Their projects, among which Alien Worlds and Farmer's World, two top blockchain games, contribute hundreds of thousands of wallet address daily activities to Wax.
Alien World is a Metaverse Odaily exploration game that integrates elements such as DeFi, Staking, DAO, land, mining, and battle. Currently, the wallet has 210,000 daily active users. Farmers World is an NFT farming game with 70,000 daily active wallets.
BNB Chain：Binance Chain is another important public chain. Binance Chain can occupy a place in the game because, first of all, Binance Chain has smart contract functions and is compatible with Ethereum EVM. Developers can easily port their projects from Ethereum. , and the transaction processing speed of Binance Chain is 35 times that of EVM, and the transaction fee is low. Secondly, the huge user base of Binance Exchange provides a large user base for chain games, and IGO can also help chain games attract a large number of users; in addition, Binance Chain also provides diversified asset APIs for its on-chain applications, top-level RPC nodes , wallet, data index, BNB side chain development support and other services; the most important thing is that Binance Incubator provides strong financial support to incubate blockchain game projects. After the rise of "Move to Earn", Binance persuaded the StepN team to migrate the hottest game to Binance Chain, which shows that the conditions that Binance Chain can provide are quite attractive.
At present, the game wallets on the Binance Chain have a total DAU of around 110,000. The more prominent games include Meta Apes (multiplayer online strategy game, 21,000 DAU), Era 7 (NFT battle card game, 17,000 DAU), X World Games (NFT battle card game, 16,000 DAU), Tiny World (combined NFT collection, farming game, 8,000 DAU) and MOBOX (NFT pet game similar to Axie, 5,000 DAU).
Polygon :The public chain Polygon originated from India is Layer 2 of Ethereum (but some people think that Polygon is a side chain because it has an independent PoS consensus mechanism). Compared with Ethereum, Polygon has fast transaction speed and low Gas fee. It is compatible with EVM so that developers can easily migrate the protocol on Ethereum to it. Polygon established Polygon Studios to incubate games and promote the development of its on-chain game projects. Sandbox (500 DAU), which currently ranks second in market value among blockchain games, is built on Polygon. The top five games on Polygon include Planet IX (66,000 DAU), Benji Bananas (62,000 DAU), Arc 8 by GAMEE (90,000 DAU), Sunflower Land (4,700 DAU), Stellum (3,000 DAU).
Blockchain game market value ranking (2023.1.5), data source: chainplay.gg
Avalanche:Avalanche is characterized by a three-chain architecture, which are transaction chain (X-Chain), contract chain (C-Chain), and platform chain (P-Chain). The founding team of Avalanche is mainly from Cornell University. The founder Emin Gün Sirer is A professor at Cornell University, he founded the blockchain organization IC 3 and developed the first POW currency system Karma in 2002. The Avalanche blockchain has the performance advantages of high throughput and low latency. Avalanche has launched a $220 million ecological construction incentive plan in November 2021, and a $290 million subnet construction incentive plan in March 2022.
Defi Kingdom, the leading game project on Harmony, received a $15 million incentive from Avalanche and decided to build a subnet DFK Chain on Avalanche as the exclusive chain of the Defi Kingdom game. However, the current game projects on the Avalanche chain, including Defi Kingdom, have relatively low daily activities, with an average daily activity of less than 100.
Solana:The FTX crash had a great impact on Solana. The DAU of its on-chain games dropped from 20,000 DAU in November to 2,326 DAU in December, a drop of 89.42%. Since December, the daily activity of games on the Solana chain has further declined, and the game with the most active game on its chain has less than 100 daily activities.
Immutable X ：Immutable X is a two-layer NFT expansion solution based on StarkWare ZK-Rollup. Immutable X supports zero-fee Mint and transfer NFT, with fast confirmation speed and performance up to 9000 TPS. Immutable completed a US$200 million financing led by Temasek in March 2022 at a valuation of US$2.5 billion. Tencent Holdings participated in the investment. Immutable X currently has a total market value of US$800 million. The game projects on Immutable X mainly include Gods Unchained (tactical card game, 2k daily activities), Guild of Guardians (multiplayer fantasy-themed RPG game) and Illuvium. Illuvium conducted virtual land NFT sales in June 2022 and is currently Developed 3 games including Illuvium: Zero. Illuvium: Zero will start internal testing on January 6, 2023. Users who hold Illuvium land NFT can participate in the inside.
Flow：Dapper Labs, the development team of the Flow public chain, was once a smash hit for developing Crypto Kitty. Later, the Dapper Labs team developed the Flow public chain, and developed NFT, blockchain games, animation, music and other ecological products on the Flow public chain. Flow rose a hundred times after the Coinlist public offering was launched, and the NBA Topshot NFT series launched in 2021 has also received widespread attention. However, in the past two years, Flow has not kept up with the rhythm of Gamefi, and various reasons such as incompatibility with EVM have caused its ecological development to be slow. One is the casual card game Solitaire Blitz (2.5k daily activities), and the other is the billiard game Trickshot Blitz (3k daily activities).
Oasys:Oasys is a game public chain (Ethereum side chain) compatible with Ethereum EVM, and supports multi-chain interaction. Oasys adopts the PoS consensus mechanism, including Layer 1 and Layer 2. The first layer is mainly used for main network consensus, and the game mainly runs on the second layer network. The co-founders of Oasys include Gabby Dizon, the co-founder of the game union YGG, the president and CEO of Bandai Namco Research Institute, and the CEO of double jump.tokyo, a blockchain game company. The development team behind Oasys has extensive blockchain development experience. Oasys has rich resources in the game industry, and has currently selected 21 well-known game companies and Web3 companies as network verification nodes. The Oasys mainnet will be launched in December 2022, and 11 games are currently being developed on it.
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Comparison of Three Types of Game Blockchains
At present, there are three main types of blockchains for building games: general-purpose public chains, game public chains, and game-specific chains. In addition, Layer 2 is not a real public chain because it needs to cooperate with the Layer 1 main chain. All three blockchains have certain advantages and disadvantages for building games.
Universal public chain
Among general-purpose public chains, BNB Chain and Polygon have attracted a large number of game developers to develop and deploy games on their chains because of their good performance, low Gas and support for EVM. The ecological and project incubation plan has achieved the number one in the total number of games on the chain, the first in the number of game increments, and the second in daily game activities. Due to the current limited number of game projects, Avalanche, EOS, and Harmony are at a disadvantage in the competition for game developers. In particular, there is an involution between Harmony and Avalanche. At the end of 2021, Defi Kingdom, the leading game on Harmony, will be in the Avalanche subnet incentive plan Attracted by the transfer to Avalanche to establish a subnet DFK Chain.
Game-specific public chain
WAX, Flow, Immutable X, Oasys, and Hive are purpose-built chains for gaming. On the one hand, the game-specific public chain has advantages in terms of expansion and speed-up, and on the other hand, it has been customized and optimized for games, so it is more suitable for building games. From the perspective of the number of daily game activities, Wax ranked first in game daily activities when the total number of games on its chain only accounted for 6%, which is three times that of the second-ranked Binance Chain. There are 36 games in the top 100 daily activities Built on Wax. Immutable X, which uses StarkWare ZK-Rollup Layer 2 expansion technology, is very popular, but the speed of ecological progress is not obvious. It may be because Immutable X is too advanced and chose the ZK Layer 2 expansion solution in 2018, but because the ZK Layer 2 expansion technology is not yet mature, it restricts the development of Immutable to a certain extent, but this is only an external factor, an internal factor Including the ecological construction and operation capabilities of the project cannot be ignored. After all, Immutable has raised nearly 300 million US dollars in several financings since 2018. In addition, although Oasys, a Japanese game-specific public chain established in March 2022, is still in the early stages of project development, it has shown good development momentum in all aspects, and its future development is worthy of attention.
Game exclusive chain:
Although the game's unique chain can enjoy a high degree of independence and functional customization, security and ecological closure are huge problems faced by the game's unique chain. Security issues mainly come from two aspects. On the one hand, there are few unique chain nodes, which inevitably leads to centralization problems. Axie Infinity's exclusive chain Ronin has encountered such a problem. Whether Ronin is stolen because of node guarding and self-stealing, or the key is leaked due to improper storage of nodes, in short, the problem is caused by too few nodes and too few nodes. It is also easy to lead to consensus attacks; on the other hand, assets on unique chains generally have cross-chain requirements, and cross-chain bridges are the hardest hit areas for blockchain theft incidents. Therefore, the security of the game's unique chain is a big problem. In addition, due to the closed nature of the unique chain ecology, it will also affect the development of game projects. At present, the development of the two game projects Axie Infinity and Defi Kingdom using the game’s unique chain is not very good.
In general, BNB Chain and Wax using side chain mode and Polygon combining side chain and Layer 2 have achieved good results in games, so side chain or Layer 2 is a development trend of game blockchain. In particular, the BNB Chain and Wax that use the side chain model are even better, followed by the Polygon that combines the side chain and Layer 2, and the Immutable that uses the pure Layer 2 is slightly inferior. In addition, compatibility with EVM is also a common feature of the above mainstream public chains. At the same time, whether the public chain is customized and optimized for games, whether it has a good ecological support plan and construction capabilities, is also an important factor affecting the development of games on the public chain.
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The Future of Blockchain Gaming
The epidemic in recent years has brought about profound changes in people's lifestyles, and many of people's activities have begun to be carried out in the virtual world, which has played an important role in promoting the development of the Metaverse. As an important part of the metaverse, games will be the first industry to welcome the wind, but blockchain games cannot achieve better development without the following conditions:
Speed and performance.
High concurrency is a characteristic of game applications, so Wax, Binance Chain, Polygon and other public chains with high concurrency and low handling fees have attracted a large number of game developers. In the future, with the maturity of Ethereum's second layer, sharding expansion and other technologies, as well as the maturity of other game public chain technologies compatible with EVM, blockchain games will have a better development and operating environment.
Cross-chain and interaction.
The cross-chain and interaction of game assets will be a direction for the development of metaverse games in the future, and the blockchain should be interconnected like the Internet. The maturity of cross-chain technology in the future will promote the cross-chain transfer of game assets and NFT, and enhance the interactive experience of the system.
Wallets and Exchanges.
Game users can truly grasp the assets in the game through the wallet. The exchange provides a trading platform and liquidity for these game asset NFTs, helping users trade and revitalize their game assets. Wallet is a key application for storing blockchain assets. At present, wallets such as Metamask are not enough to support the widespread adoption of blockchain games. Wallets will further enhance user friendliness to promote the popularity of blockchain games.
Game playability.
The biggest difference between blockchain games and traditional games is that gamers are also investors. Many blockchain games have gone in the wrong direction, treating all users as investors only, and forgetting that the essence of making games is to develop high-quality games that users are willing to pay for. If most people play a game just to make money, and no one is willing to pay for it, it becomes a Ponzi scheme. The profits of the Ponzi scheme participants all come from the funds of the latecomers. If the latecomers are insufficient, they will not be able to cash in their profits, resulting in a collapse.
The game should rely on the payment of some users or the profit from selling peripheral products to maintain the operation of the project, and the remaining profits are distributed to shareholders or token holders. Therefore, blockchain games need to work hard on game experience and playability. Token economics is essentially just a design of equity structure. No matter how good token economics is, it cannot replace the development, operation and profitability of the project itself.
It is believed that with the maturity of the above conditions, more and more game developers and investors will enter this industry to promote the production of some blockchain games with exquisite graphics, first-class experience and high playability.
