Crypto Gaming Round-up #8

and

Mar 14, 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.

Learn more

Immutable X Raises $200 Million

Immutable X raised $200m at a $2.5bn valuation, with the round led by Temasek, a Singaporean government-owned asset manager, and including Tencent, Animoca Brands and others. The news comes just weeks after Immutable announced its partnership with GameStop to host GameStop’s marketplace. The team intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and double the headcount at its gaming studio, currently at 165 employees.

Efinity parachain launches on Polkadot

Enjin’s Efinity parachain went live on Polkadot last week, after running on a Polkadot testnet since the beginning of March.

Enjin | We're Hiring! @enjin

The Metaverse is live on @Polkadot. After years of intensive research and development, #Efinity has launched! A historic milestone for the Enjin community and wider NFT ecosystem. ➡️ enj.in/efinity-launch #Enjin $ENJ $EFI #Polkadot

According to the team’s announcement, the next step is integrating Efinity into Enjin’s platform and onboarding the 100+ projects committed to building on it. While the current version of Efinity is focused on chain stability and core functionality, creators can begin to test it out. For instance, they can mint up to 2,200 tokens to different wallets in a single transaction and batch transfer a similar amount. The gas on Efinity has been set conservatively to allow time for testing. The team suggested that a standard NFT transfer should cost around $0.50 (in EFI).

As a bit of a side note, we are excited about MyMeta MMO, 3 years in development, launching their closed-alpha on Efinity on March 31st.

What is Frontier?

Missing Frontier revealed more concept art, and the team also published an article explaining what the Frontier actually is.

FRONTIER @missingfrontier

✚ Game Development Today we're happy to present the work of Vincent, who recently joined our Concept Art Department at Frontier. ✚ Join the Discord discord.gg/thewatch

“Frontier is a fast-paced and competitive free-to-play online P2E game, which combines elements of real-time tactics and MOBA.”

The article discussed the backstory of Frontier and the larger Watcher universe and went through the current NFTs that exist and their role in the ecosystem. It also briefly touched on tokenomics (in development), eventual transition to an L2, investors (no private rounds yet, but seed might be coming) and links to the roadmap. The team is currently 20 people, which is relatively small to build a proper blockchain game, in our opinion, so it makes a lot of sense that the team is trying to rapidly scale.

Misfits Gaming Group (MGG) partners with Tezos

MSG is a professional esports and entertainment organisation, competing in Overwatch, League of Legends, Call of Duty and Fortnite. Last week, the team announced a multi-year technical partnership with Tezos, with the deal including branding and sponsorship rights, content, community-building, etc.

MSG also announced the launch of their blockchain gaming platform and community, Block Born. Furthermore, it will refocus its $10m gaming incubator towards blockchain games, renaming it to MSF Tezos Gaming Incubator.

From our perspective, it’s very interesting to see various chains securing marquee gaming partnerships. This will invariably lead to the splintering of player liquidity and delay the development of player network effects.

Aurory dev update

The Aurory team published “State of Aurory”, a detailed dev update on the ecosystem.

*PvP battle system testing between team members.*

The team has grown to 49 people and is one of the biggest gaming projects on Solana. State of Aurory touches on recent developments, art and animation. On the tech side, the article covers the building of the cloud back-end, the Aurory marketplace (expected to be live in March) and NFT staking.

In this context, it’s worth digging up an interesting piece of research on Aurory from Daolectic Research, published in late January.