Crypto Gaming Round-up #7

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Mar 07, 2022

MetaPortal Gaming Index, $GAME, is designed to provide exposure to the emergent crypto gaming space. Investing across games, virtual worlds and gaming platforms. The index is a simple and effective way to express the view that crypto games will capture a greater share of the burgeoning gaming market.

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Merit Circle entering a new era

Merit Circle, a gaming guild DAO, released a post last week outlining their new direction going forward. The team has identified four verticals that they believe fall within the core competencies of the DAO and will accrue value for the organisation over time.

Investments and Gaming verticals are relatively familiar and something MC has been doing since its inception. These simply refer to scholars/gamers and the guild investing in tokens / NFTs of new games that fit its criteria. Merit Circle Studios will act as a game publisher of sorts, working with developers from an early stage in a hands-on, advisory capacity. This could be similar to an incubator or a launchpad for games. And with Merit Circle Marketplace, the team is looking to build a gaming-centric marketplace, which they believe fills a significant gap in the market today.

FTX Gaming targets India through IndiGG partnership

We covered the creation of FTX Gaming last week. To recap, FTX Gaming will basically offer a full range of services, like infra, advisory, funding, etc., for game developers to integrate blockchain and NFT tech into their games.

This week, they are partnering with IndiGG, the India-focused subDAO of Yield Guild Games, to capitalise on the growth of the Indian gaming market. Some stats:

“Gaming grew from a $0.8bn industry in 2019 to a $1.8bn industry in 2021. This number is expected to cross $7bn by 2025.”

As part of the partnership, IndiGG, which aims to incubate games as part of its mandate, will work with and utilise FTX Gaming’s white-label tech and compliance solutions. At the same time, games in FTX’s broader venture portfolio will have access to IndiGG’s resources, including distribution network, players and on-the-ground resources in India.

Treasure marketplace suffers an exploit

Treasure marketplace suffered an exploit, with 154 NFTs stolen due to a bug in the code. The marketplace was quickly shut down as the team assessed the damage, investigated, and worked to patch up the vulnerability. Some stolen items were from the Smol Brains collection, arguably the most popular collection on Arbitrum.

In their post mortem, the team identified the responsible party, with the exploit coming from a contractor associated with one of the teams building on top of the MAGIC ecosystem. Although there seems to be a lot of back and forth and finger-pointing here.

As of this morning, all but 4 NFTs were returned to their owners, and those who didn’t get their original NFTs back received full compensation. The timeline for the restart of the marketplace is uncertain. The team is doing various peer reviews of the code and is working with an audit provider to get an official audit.

Decentral Games airdrops xDG to players and guilds

Decentral Games airdropped ~5.9m xDG (staked DG), approximately $2m at the time of the airdrop, to ICE wearable owners and those players who have been playing with delegated wearables. The goal of the airdrop is to increase the participation of players and wearable owners in the governance of the broader DG ecosystem. The holders of xDG on Polygon jumped from ~4,800 to ~8,800, with over 12,000 addresses eligible to claim the tokens.

Last week, the DG team also shipped some premium guild features, including the delegation dashboard, the ability to name your guild and players, and more. Other features are in the works as well. As a side note, Decentraland (where DG venues are based) recently released their desktop client beta, which should enable a much smoother experience with quicker rendering.

Axie Infinity reveals more Origin cards

Sky Mavis has been leaking more and more details about Axie Origin. They shared Origin tail cards with the community last week and promptly followed that up by revealing the back cards. It appears that the Axie Origin update is getting really close to launch, with a soft launch targeted for the end of March.

There was also the marketplace fee update, with fees increased from 4.25% to 5.25% to accommodate the 1% creator code.

The Crabada team launches the Swimmer Network, an Avalanch subnet

Yet another gaming project decided to launch their own blockchain in an effort to scale their game and improve player experience. According to the team’s announcement, Crabada takes up about 16% of block space on Avalanche and migrating to their own subnet would reduce costs for players by 85%.

The Swimmer Network will also enable games to subsidise gas for some player actions, which is pretty cool. Polygon used to give everyone 1 MATIC, which made migrating to Polygon that much easier as users didn’t have to acquire the native gas token of the network.

$TUS, which is the in-game currency of the Crabada game, will be used for gas on the Swimmer Network, with a share of the fees burnt. The burn will start at 25% of all fees and increase to 80% over time. The comparison would be if Axie Infinity chose to use $SLP as the gas token on the Ronin network. Grants are available to build on top of the Swimmer Network.

Axes Hunters pre-Alpha sneak peek

Azur Games, the team behind Axes Hunters, has been developing mobile games for nearly 5 years now. They have a large team of 400 people, 2 billion installs and 30 million DAUs for their existing titles.

Last week, they released a sneak peek of the Axes Hunters pre-Alpha gameplay and announced that the extended trailer with more attack mechanics and skills would arrive soon. To learn more about the vision, check out the whitepaper.

ARBO Protocol Deep Dive #1

Arbo is a sci-fi tactical battler and adventure game. The team started a blog series that will provide an in-depth look at the Protocols, including the current status of the gameplay mechanics.

Ascenders, a new sci-fantasy, open world action RPG on Avalanche

We won’t dwell on this one for too long. Ascenders are launching on an Avalanche subnet and is a sci-fantasy, open-world action RPG with quests, dungeons, and city building. The full launch is planned for Q4 2023, so yeah, a while away. The team did drop a trailer last week, though!

Endless Clouds releases Monthly Treeverse Update #3

Endless Clouds, the studio building the Treeverse, a sci-fi and fantasy-based MMORPG, released their 3rd monthly update. The update touches on the concept art and progress in that area, provides some visuals for animations, and extensively covers the engineering progress.