Guild of Guardians launch, & a lot of data
Blockchain gaming roundup 17th May
Taking centre stage this week is Immutable’s Guild of Guardians with its global launch on iOS and Android. Jon’s not only been head down playing the game and making some helpful videos along the way, but also checked in with game director Chris Clay to get his view on the game launch, how it’s been received so far, its NFT creation, and the team’s strategy moving into the liveops stage.
Not surprisingly, our biggest story was also from earlier in the week when Guild of Guardians became the top-traded gaming NFT collection across all blockchains.
In other news, the most popular blockchain game Pixels broke 1 million daily active users on 13th May – although the number has since decreased to 725,000. Axie Infinity still holds the record of 1.1 million DAUWs.
Hitting another milestone this week, Mythical Games’ NFL Rivals reached $5 million in NFT trading volume. Of course a range of factors would contribute to this, but the most obvious one seems to be the game’s recently introduced quick swap feature, which lets users store up multiple unwanted NFTs in their inventory until they reach the amount required to swap them with an NFT player they do want. Since this integration, NFL Rivals’ trading volume has accelerated notably.
Continuing on the theme of data… DappRadar has released its April 2024 industry report, and squeezed out some eye-watering headlines, claiming that $988 million was invested into web3 gaming in April 2024 alone. The only problem is, the funding is not only related to web3 gaming, indeed it might only be a minority of the funding on which DappRadar bases the number.
But before we look into the details, let’s look at why we even bother pointing this out? It’s not to discredit DappRadar or Blockchain Game Alliance who backs the report, of course, but because throwing out exaggerated numbers does no one a favour. Certainly not an industry which is already tainted by lack of trust and transparency – foundational values which the web3 gaming industry should promote more of, not less.
Firstly, out of the $988 million, $600 million is from a16z games fund, which is not web3 specific. It might be years before we know the numerous games and projects this fund actually invested in. This leads us onto the next problem. As game studios regularly announce funding rounds, these will in some part contain money from game funds such as a16z’s, but the exact amount is not disclosed. Instead, this gets counted as new funding into web3 gaming, and hence, inaccurately, gets counted twice.
Similarly, as for the $275 million-strong Bitkraft Ventures games fund, it’s aimed at “gaming and interactive media companies”. That’s $875 million out of the $988 million.
Perhaps even more astonishing however is the numbers reporting on which games are currently leading in web3. DappRadar is a great data source which we regularly use to track daily and monthly active user wallets in games, so it’s odd to see how the data in the report is so wildly misrepresentative.
It claims that Pixels, which we mentioned above with its 1 million DAUWs, has over 20 million monthly active wallets. How does DappRadar add up to this number? By accumulating the same daily active users every day for a month, it seems, which is nothing like unique MAUWs.
Additional news
Anichess onboards esports brand Team Secret ahead of PVP release
Apeiron unveils $1 million Apeiron Guild Wars 2024 tournament
Still some way off, but check out our upcoming Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki conference 1-2 October, and Pocket Gamer Connects Jordan 9-10 November.