Crypto Gaming Round-up #5
Animoca Brands acquires motorsport game maker Grease Monkey Games
Animoca Brands, parent company of The Sandbox, REVV and other blockchain gaming studios, acquired Grease Monkey Games, the developer of PC and mobile racing games. Its titles have been downloaded over 45 million times globally and the indie developer has a plethora of relationship and licensing deals with vehicle and parts manufacturers.
Grease Monkey Games should be able to add a lot of value to the REVV Motorsport ecosystem as well as bring its own catalogue of new games. They will work closely with Animoca on things like fungible and non-fungible token implementations, any play-to-earn dynamics and potential synergies. The team is also getting ready to release a major cross-platform racing game that is built using the Unreal Engine.
MixMob raises a seed round and releases gameplay footage
MixMob, a P2E gaming experience platform on Solana, raised $7m in its seed round led by Defiance Capital. Developed by Encore Studios, MixMob will start off with a strategy card racing game and plans on progressing to a full MMO over time. The team released some game footage last week as well, with the Alpha coming in April 2022.
More gameplay leaks and a mysterious snapshot from Guild of Guardians
We also had gameplay leaks from Guild of Guardians and there was a mysterious snapshot taken by the team. We don’t know if the snapshot was of NFT holders or token holders, if it’s for airdrops or early game access, it’s all a mystery.
The Bornless Game sells the first batch of NFTs
The Bornless Game sold out its first collection of 666 Bornless NFTs. There will be a total of eight collections, 666 NFTs in each of them, which are staggered to coincide with different game seasons.
The team is building a multiplayer first-person shooter horror game using Unreal Engine with plans for an AR treasure hunt, eSports tournaments and a VR implementation of the game (which is currently in early development). The upcoming Incense token will be used for in-game purchases and other in-game mechanics.
Missing Frontier phase Zero roadmap
Missing Frontier, a P2E competitive game in partnership with Ubisoft, recently released its roadmap for its phase Zero of 2022. During this phase, the team will focus on tokenomics, game economy design and legal matters related to royalty payouts and IP.
Vulcan Forged ships new features
It’s been a busy week in VulcanVerse. The team shared a sneak peek of their new game, Vulcan Runner, with the alpha available to download in their Discord. Each run will cost 1 $LAVA, the soft currency of the VulcanVerse. At the end of the day, all the $LAVA collected from the game will be split up, with 50% going to top 50 players of the day and the other 50% being burned, introducing a $LAVA sink mechanism.
In addition to the new game, the team also introduced staking for Land, starting from Level 2 land, and the Vucanites rentals feature.
Banger Games raises €10 million in a seed round
Banger Games raised €10 million to build a crypto-focused gaming hub that aims to aggregate players' gaming experiences across various games under its roof. The platform will offer things like an SDK for publishers, best-in-class anti-cheat in partnership with IBM and cloud gaming further down the line. What excites us the most is that the platform is planning to have some things we have yet to see in crypto gaming, such as Battles Passes for games, cross-game achievements, and will use its token to incentivise actions beneficial to the platform.
Oh, and they’ve been testing a closed-beta of CS:GO.
Sipher publishes “State of Monetization”, first of the three-part series looking at in-game economies
The team at Sipher is putting together a three-part series of articles on the state of play-to-earn games and their in-game economies, and the approach that Sipher will take to develop a long-term, sustainable ecosystem.
The first article, “State of Monetization”, looks at monetisation strategies for PC games, mobile games and current crypto games. Specifically, it points out that most crypto games today focus almost exclusively on the “earn” element and that “earner only” economies don’t work. The second piece will outline Sipher’s approach to building a sustainable economy and interactions between developers, players and earners in its ecosystem.
Other news
Strider raises $3m from 1kx, Sfermion and others
Recording of Tezos Respawn, a virtual gaming and sports conference hits 2m views
Crypto Unicorns Public token sale rescheduled to February 28
Messari publishes The State of the Sandbox Q4 2021 and Blockchains: Changing the Game
Podcast of the week
Piers Kicks on how to evaluate investments in blockchain gaming