In November, the crypto market continued to be active. Following the surge in ecosystems such as Bitcoin and Solana, many old tracks such as meme and GameFi also began to receive a lot of attention. Some crypto communities have noticed that the blockchain gaming sector seems to have entered a news-intensive period recently, and many crypto users are very optimistic about the prospect of blockchain gamings explosion.
Cobo co-founder and CEO Shenyu also mentioned GameFi Summer on his social platform on Sunday, saying that games are naturally perfectly integrated with the characteristics of the chain and have become one of the typical scenarios. In a recent tweet, Shenyu raised questions around GameFi Summer, intending to discuss the development prospects of chain games with the community.
Although no one can give an absolutely correct answer to the market, BlockBeats did find that this discussion on GameFi was not groundless. In fact, since the beginning of this round of market conditions, we can see the gradual start of this sector. In this regard, BlockBeats compiled the launch process of this round of GameFi boom based on recent relevant news and market dynamics.
Refining returns
Since the explosion of StepN, GameFi has been criticized for its token model issues. It is often called refining oil and is disliked by many communities. However, since September this year, several higher-quality GameFi projects such as Matr1x Fire and Mahjong have appeared on the market again, and they have also received excellent response from the community. The rise of GameFi has been “starting to take shape” since then.
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The event site of Matr1x Fire in September. In the deep winter of the encryption industry, even in a field as popular as ZK, few teams can organize community activities with such an atmosphere alone.
Established chain travel projects develop
At the beginning of November, the prices of two established game tokens, IMX and ILV, with “big company backgrounds” rose, once again arousing the market’s attention to the blockchain gaming sector. Immutable Since then, its TVL has been rising all the way, now reaching US$214 million, a 7-day increase of 40.93%.
On November 8, the RPG masterpiece Illuvium built on the ImmutableX second-tier network is also scheduled to be launched on the Epic Games Store on November 28, and its token price increased by 59%.
Prior to this, on October 31, the P2E chain game Pixels announced that it would be launched on the Ronin Network. At the same time, it would open the casting of Pixels Pets (NFT with instant game utility) on the Ronin Chain, and would launch the PIXEL token. According to Blur data, Pixels Land NFT is currently trading at 0.88 ETH, with a weekly increase of over 31%.
In the announcement, Pixel stated that community has always been our driving force, and Ronin has more Web3 users than any other blockchain network. BlockBeats found that many of the KOLs promoting Pixels are deep players of Axie Infinity . Additionally, Ronin and Jihoz, the founder of Axie Infinity, appear among Pixel NPCs. Jihoz himself often promotes Pixels on his official account, saying, To be honest, Pixels has the early feel of Axie.
According to Coingecko data, Ronin, the token of the Ethereum side chain Ronin Network, has experienced significant gains in the past week, with a weekly increase of 63.3%. As of the time of writing, it was quoted at US$0.82, with an increase of 38% on the 7th. On November 16, Jihoz said that the number of daily active addresses of Pixels had exceeded 100,000. Although there is no clear data to point to, the community generally believes that this growth comes from the game Pixels, which Ronin recently promoted.
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The price of Ronin tokens and the number of active addresses on the network have increased rapidly after Pixel joined the ecosystem; image source comes from CoinGecko
Established game projects and chains were collectively exposed in early November, becoming the first wave of momentum for the chain gaming sector in this round of rising prices. In addition to the launch of established blockchain gaming projects, game masterpieces that received large amounts of funding in the previous cycle have also recently been opened to the market.
Chain game masterpieces are concentrated in the market
In mid-October, the 3A chain game BigTime token BIGTIME rose nearly 20 times two days after it was listed on OKX. At that time, the overall market was declining, and its wealth creation effect set off a wave of small hot spots and new narratives. Some people even shouted The slogan Follow BigTime and enter the next wave of blockchain gaming bull market.
BigTime is a multiplayer action role-playing game for PC. It is led by the former founder of Mana and has recruited a development team composed of game industry veterans from leading game companies such as Epic Games, Blizzard, EA and Riot. In terms of funding, BigTime has raised more than US$90 million through primary market financing and NFT sales.
Dacheng, the head of BigTimes Chinese region, said in an AMA titled Web3 Games and KOL Cooperation: How Ordinary People Participate in Web3 Games to Make Profit said, We are looking for small and medium-sized game anchors and invite them to play early games as testers. , make suggestions. Under this model, many people don’t take any money at all, help us play for free, and then ask fans to play together. We will move more and more to Web 2, and may play Steam, Apple games, and also make traditional purchases. If the quantity, advertising, and game quality are high, there is no difference between Web3 and Web2.”
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Although the game has caused a lot of controversy in the community after it was launched, some said that the project changed teams for marketing, some said that the market maker relied on KYC to control the BIGTIME token, and some people called BigTime BugTime because of the frequent bugs in the game, but it is undeniable The thing is, its been a long time since the market discussed a GameFi game like this.
Douyu platform anchors use BigTime to do game live broadcasts, which shows the degree of the projects out-of-circuit; image source comes from the Internet
In addition, another major 3A masterpiece also continued to build momentum in November. On November 1, Gas Hero, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game launched by STEPN developer Find Satoshi Lab, announced that it would conduct community testing from November 24 to December 8 and open testing qualifications to 3,000 users. On November 27, Gas Hero officially launched community testing.
Gas Hero is the second official game project launched by the STEPN team. With its unique and efficient community operation and KOL linkage model, as well as its high-level gaming gameplay that combines power, influence, and wealth, Gas Hero has become a key player in this crypto bear market. The most anticipated game project.
The STEPN token GMT has risen from a low of $0.17 at the beginning of the month to a maximum of $0.36, an increase of more than 110%. After the beta version of Gas Hero went online yesterday, there was a situation where network congestion occurred and the verification code could not be received. The official reply was due to large short-term traffic, which is enough to show how popular Gas Hero is.
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Yesterday, the full-chain real-time strategy game Sky Strife developed by Lattice also started testing. Its Season 0 will last from November 27 to December 15. It is the first continuous game test of Sky Strife on Redstone and the longest so far. Game testing.
Although Sky Strife has been trialled many times in the past, this test is the first time it has been deployed on the newly released Redstone testnet. The performance of Redstone and whether it can handle the influx of a large number of users at the same time is also a highlight of this test.
According to community feedback, Sky Strifes test token only costs 0.3 RMB each, but now a pass card costs almost 3,000 RMB. Users bluntly said, The Bull Market Test Network has never seen anything like this. There are also many people outside the community. Collect holeskys ETH for game trial.
Another chain game that has become very popular recently is Seraph, a Diablo-like APRG game, which is backed by Actoz Soft, a listed Korean game company. On November 19, Seraph issued 3,000 game equipment boxes at a price of 0.06 ETH. After they were sold out, the floor price once rose to more than 0.4 ETH, gaining more than 6 times the increase. Seraph started a new round of testing last week, and many players who wanted to experience the game as soon as possible even purchased test activation codes off-site.
Base Chain’s GameFi Carnival
Social networking and games are indistinguishable. This has been well verified in the Web2 world. It goes without saying that Friend.Tech is a hot project on the social track, and the Base chain it is based on has become the home of dApps with promising prospects since its launch in August 2023.
Parallel, which has received US$50 million in financing from Paradigm and was once valued at US$500 million, also put its NFT cards on the Base chain for Mint. At the same time, it cooperated with a series of marketing activities by Base, intending to take advantage of the trend. Since then, a number of hot-selling projects have appeared on the Base chain, triggering a market frenzy.
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On November 17, a pet-raising chain game called “Fren Pet” was promoted by the official accounts of Coinbase and Base. Subsequently, Fren Pet received great attention from the overseas community. Many players searched for invitation codes on Twitter and flocked to Fren Pet. The team even stated that the game once had an API overload problem.
Changes in total TVL volume of Base chain projects on November 18, FrenPet remains at the top of the list; source of image comes from CoinGecko
As a pet-raising game based on the Base chain, players can purchase props by purchasing Fren Pets token FP, and earn points by feeding pets and fighting against other players pets. The higher the points, the higher the ranking on the leaderboard and the ETH reward you will receive. There are players trading pets in the Fren Pet game on OpenSea. The floor price of a pet is 0.01 ETH. Its price far exceeds the cost of minting pets in the game (almost 0). However, the total price of Fren Pet pets on OpenSea is 0.01 ETH. The trading volume has exceeded 18 ETH.
Although the gameplay of Fren Pet is simple, it is attracting the participation of new players and the continued investment of existing players through the reward mechanism. For example, Fren Pet generates social fission through an invitation system. The recommender can obtain 10% of all FP spent by the invitee in the app, thereby achieving new customers and promoting activity with zero customer acquisition cost. Therefore, the game is also called FT Chain version of the game.
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Projects such as Friend.Tech, Base Name Service, Fren Pet, and Base Swap on the Base Network provide users with social networks, seamless transitions, pet games, and DEX services, as well as Aerodrome Finance as an AMM that provides users with the ability to participate manually or automatically Options for centralized liquidity strategies. It can be said that the prosperity of the Base chain ecology is inseparable from social networking and games, and this is the core reason why many crypto users continue to be optimistic about the chain gaming sector.
Sector rotation or improving fundamentals?
The basic logic behind the hype of chain games in the last bull market was the P2E earning mechanism. Because you can make money by playing games, chain games attracted a large number of people to flock to them, and the price of tokens rose. If the GameFi craze in 2021 is the result of sufficient funds and speculation in the bull market, then the current token price is still at the bottom stage where the price has returned to value after the bubble burst and has stabilized.
On May 25, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said, “Web3 games are one of the biggest drivers of mass adoption of cryptocurrency. In the next 6-18 months, some top games will be released in Web3. Last year alone, Web3 games raised over $2 billion in funding.”
From a financing perspective, funds are still choosing to enter the chain gaming sector. According to DappRadar data, the blockchain gaming field attracted US$739 million in investment in Q1 of 2023, while Q2 and Q3 attracted US$973 million and US$600 million in investment respectively. Although the Q4 data has not yet been determined, it can be seen through several financings in November.
On November 8, 1kx led GameFi platform Citadel’s US$3.3 million seed round of financing; on November 15, a16z CSS 23 Accelerator Program participated in the chain gaming project EthXY’s US$1.6 million pre-seed round of financing. On November 17, game studio Bazooka Tango successfully raised US$5 million. On November 20, developer protocol Saga announced that it had successfully received US$5 million in seed round financing led by venture capital firm Placeholder. On November 27, Farcana, a chain gaming project headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, announced that it had received strategic investment from Animoca Brands.
On November 23, Web3 digital entertainment platform MATR1X announced that it had successfully raised US$10 million in Series A-2 financing, bringing its total financing to US$20 million. Its first game, MATR1X FIRE, became the first game in the Metaverse. A mobile shooting game that has attracted more than 200,000 game users. In addition, Matr1xs PFP series Matr1x 2061 has increased nearly 3 times in the past 30 days, and the sale of Matr1x KUKU is also in progress, becoming the focus of platform-level NFT.
In addition to the continued inflow of funds, the playability of chain games has also been frequently discussed, and playability cannot be separated from the follow-up of infrastructure.
On November 9, DWF Labs announced a strategic partnership with Gala Games, an Ethereum ecological chain gaming platform, to accelerate the adoption of its L1 GalaChain.
On November 15, Lattice, the team behind the full-chain open source engine MUD, announced the launch of L2 Redstone, which is suitable for on-chain games and self-made worlds. It has now been launched on the Redstone Holesky test network. Redstone is an Alt-DA chain inspired by Plasma, built on the OP Stack.
Currently, the Lattice team is developing MUD V2, which will provide developers with greater flexibility in reading and writing to the blockchain. Projects supported by MUD also include the full-chain city construction game Primodium and the on-chain Scrabble game. Word 3.
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On November 25, a crypto KOL revealed that the TreasureDAO team is developing its own blockchain, aiming to create a dedicated gaming ecological platform. This blockchain may be based on Arbitrum or COSMOS. This news was confirmed by TreasureDAO co-founder Karel Vuong as soon as it was disclosed.
This wave of growth in the chain gaming sector has focused on both specific projects and community discussions. In the past, due to uneven game quality, lack of player demand, and deficiencies in economic model design, GameFi left a deep impression on most Web3 practitioners as a local dog and a Ponzi. However, it is difficult for todays 3A chain games to have the impression of being associated with local dogs. The funds are in place, and marketing follows closely. The sophisticated large-scale production not only conveys the teams strength and willingness to do things to the outside world, but also continuously develops from playable to fun. path of.
But as independent researcher Jason Chen Jian said, Unfortunately, we have not yet seen the emergence of paradigm innovations like CryptoKitties, Axie, and StepN. And encryption analysts@thecryptoskandaHe does not think that the fundamentals of chain games have improved. He believes that the top chain games today are still successful projects two years ago and one year ago. Hyping GameFi seems to have become an indispensable reserved program for every wave of crypto market.
From established blockchain gaming projects to new blockchain gaming forces, from financing narratives to infrastructure alignment, the recent changes in the GameFi field are indeed eye-catching. But on the other hand, the issue of the token economic model that people have always questioned seems to still be unresolved. What exactly makes GameFi vital again today? The answers given by the community still need time and the market to verify. But at least for now, the next Axie moment for GameFi that people have been waiting for is far from coming.
