Blockchain gaming weekly roundup: 12th June

Opinions
By Jenny Jordan

While much of the games industry remains confused by, wary of, or outright hostile to AI, most blockchain game companies are embracing it. The latest to get on board is The Sandbox, which this week announced The Sandbox Studio, its AI-centric game creation and distribution platform.

On the creation side, Studio provides the framework to ensure whatever AI model you’re using builds experiences in a coherent manner. In addition to this harness, Studio provides creators with access to tens of thousands of assets and six production-ready TypeScript templates.

And creators aren’t just limited to the project’s characteristic blocky art style either. Using AI means games can look any way their creators want them to.

But more than just a creation tool, The Sandbox Studio is also a distribution platform. Starting with support for web games across PC, mobile and Telegram, The Sandbox hopes to extend its options to app stores and Steam. Studio includes monetization options too, with The Sandbox taking a small percentage as revenue share.

With any such announcement, there’s a lot of complexity involved, and we won’t really get a good idea of how — or whether — it works until it’s live, even in its current alpha form.

But after many months of difficulties and false dawns, it feels like The Sandbox has finally found a coherent vision for future success.

Of course, it’s not just The Sandbox that’s hoping AI will give it a technological edge. The first games from MapleStory Universe’s Vibe Camp hackathon are already live on the Verse8 platform, YGG Play has published the Verse8-created Ragnarok Breaker, and my own minor effort — a World Cup-based meta game called Soccerverse Showdown — is also live.

June 5th: Are we finally moving from the era of blockchain games into the era of blockchain game ecosystems? Let’s hope so.

The signs are promising. Following Fenris Creations’ $80,000 EVE Frontier x Sui hackathon in March comes Nexpace and Verse8’s $60,000 Vibe Camp for MapleStory Universe. Starting on Monday 8th June and running for three weeks, registered builders will use Verse8’s AI game-making tools and MapleStory’s IP to come up with new experiences.

Of course, beyond these individual timed events, both games are keen to create communities ready to leverage AI and extend the foundational base games they are developing with the next generation of user-generated content.

But it’s not just the big boys who can take this path. Any game with permissionless onchain elements is now available for experimentation, in the process being modified from a game into an ecosystem.

A good example is UK indie Soccerverse, with two independent World Cup-themed experiences currently being built by fans using its fully onchain data. These are the fantasy football-style Grand Tournament and my own player-picking prediction market Summer Showdown. And if I can do it, really anyone can.

News Roundup

May 29th: What made this week’s news roundup interesting wasn’t the news.

These are all useful data points, but the episode was interesting as those stories were used as evidence of a deeper shift in web3 gaming.

The core argument is that many blockchain games spent the past decade trying to become “game games” — conventional games with NFTs, tokens or wallets attached. That has failed. Not because these games were always badly made, or because blockchain is automatically pointless, but because the value proposition was confused.

They were trying to compete with traditional games on moment-to-moment fun, while also carrying the extra complexity of wallets, economies, governance and speculation.

The stronger blockchain-native opportunity is elsewhere. It sits within what we’re calling “non-game games”: persistent systems where the appeal is not primarily reflexes, polish or authored content, but ownership, rivalry, reputation, status, long-term progression and player-created structures.

EVE Frontier, Soccerverse, MapleStory Universe and Alien Worlds make more sense through that lens. Their value is not that they feel like Mario. Their value is that they create worlds in which players can organize, build, compete, automate and accumulate meaning over time.

And this is why the new AI coding angle matters. AI does not simply make development cheaper. It changes who can build. Five years ago, most fans could make videos, write posts or trade assets around a game, but they could not easily create useful software, dashboards, agents or companion systems. With APIs, MCPs and tools like Claude Code, that barrier is falling. A committed community member can now build things around a game that previously required a small studio.

That also reframes DAOs. Handing a broken game to a DAO is not magic. Communities are hard to coordinate, and open source is not a business model. But if a game already has durable value, social structure and accessible tooling, community development becomes more plausible.

In that context, we can but hope that blockchain games may finally stop trying to be normal games with tokens, and start becoming machine-readable, player-owned, AI-extended worlds.

May 22th: After eight years of people trying to make blockchain games, it has become apparent what doesn’t work. But what does work? The news from three companies this week provides some strong pointers.

First up, Nexon, Wemade and Fenris Creations (ex-CCP Games) are all very experienced and well-financed corporations, who have much more to lose in terms of reputational damage than they have to gain from fast crypto sleights of hand. These are companies building serious products and using blockchain seriously to improve their games, particularly in terms of how players interact with them.

Without blockchain, it’s very difficult to enable third-party builders to access APIs and SDKs, let alone getting commercial access to IP. Blockchain doesn’t solve all these problems, but it significantly lowers the barriers. Blockchain also plays into the concept of building long-term games, allowing players to own and trade in-game assets. Indeed, following the news that MapleStory Universe had generated $31 million of revenue during its first year, the CEO of Nexon’s web3 arm Nexpace commented that his goal in year two was that third-party builders would generate more money than it would.

News Roundup

May 15th: There was other blockchain gaming news this week.

But the really significant news was CCP Games rebranding to Fenris Creations as it completed a $120 million management buyout from its previous owner Pearl Abyss.

Of course, the main focus of the deal was EVE Online, especially with Google DeepMine coming onboard as a minority investor and strategic partner. It will be training new AI models with long-term memory in an offline version of the space game.

It also added speculative context to detail that Pearl Abyss had taken $20 million of the MBO price in EVE Frontier’s tokens.

Obviously, it wouldn’t have done that without some degree of confidence that these could increase in value over the years. How directly this relates to DeepMine’s future involvement in EVE Frontier, as well as EVE Online is pure conjecture.

Still, it is noteworthy that Fenris Creations has now sold $60 million-worth of EVE Frontier tokens to its various investors, and now Pearl Abyss.

That’s plenty of big corporations with skin in the future of this particular game.

May 8th: It was another week in which some blockchain games went forward and some backwards. Mythical Games’ FIFA Rivals is one that’s on the up. In the build-up to the 2026 World Cup, all its NFTs have been migrated to the new stablecoin marketplace Pulse, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Bruno Guimaraes and Erling Haaland among the most popular trades this week. But no-one could beat the GOAT on price. The most expensive sale was a Mythical Lionel Messi at $120.

Meanwhile, Distinct Possibility Studios’ PC extraction shooter Reaper Actual announced a new funding round in the build-up to the game heading into Steam Early Access during May.

Things aren’t looking so good for Playful Studios’ Wildcard, however. Its community monetization platform Thousands is being shut down, with the game also losing its multiplayer mode. Hence, it looks like Wildcard will only continue to exist as a web2 single-player title, perhaps with a console and/or mobile port.

April 24th: Positive news this week came from the likes of Parallel Studios, which announced the global release of its Parallel TCG through app stores. This comes five years after the launch of the original NFT set and the company’s $50 million Series A round.

Bad news came from Roblox-on-blockchain platform Hytopia, which announced it was pausing operations, while it awaits a refund from the IRS.

The news from Mythical Games was more mixed. It had planned to migrate FIFA Rivals to its new stablecoin-based Pulse marketplace. It is the final one of Mythical’s five games with live NFTs to be migrated to Pulse, after which the original Mythical Market could be shut down. However, for an unannounced reason, FIFA Rivals hasn’t yet migrated.

Obviously, it will have to happen fairly soon as there’s less than 50 days before the World Cup starts, so Mythical will want the game up-and-running on its new stable marketplace ASAP. Hopefully, we’ll hear more next week.

Finally, there were announcements from two web3 game hackathons with CCP Games distributing $80,000 in cash and SUI tokens to the eight winners of its EVE Frontier x Sui 2026 hackathon, while the winners of Verse8 and YGG Play’s hackathon will get the opportunity to see their titles commercially released by the Casual Degen publisher.

April 17th: If you want to build an ecosystem, you need to find some builders, and that’s what CCP Games has been encouraging with its first hackathon for EVE Frontier. Held in conjunction with the Sui blockchain, over 120 submissions were received for the event, which boasts an $80,000 prize pool.

Looking at the entries, the strongest trend was not flashy gameplay extensions but infrastructure such as bounty boards, escrow marketplaces for exploration intel, and guild-management software. Of course, there were also a bunch of low-effort entries, some unrelated to EVE, or padded out with AI-generated filler.

But the better projects suggested the formation of a group of builders who will eventually need to become as important as CCP Games for the overall success of the ecosystem.

The other big story this week was US dev Limit Break finally revealing its long-awaited mobile game, now in soft launch on iOS in selected markets. After raising $200 million in 2022, the studio has unveiled Puzzle Panic, a casual puzzle game built around its collectable anime-style DigiDaigaku NFT characters. On the surface, this looks far more modest than many expected. But the more interesting interpretation is that the game is the consumer-friendly front end for a deeper technical stack.

Limit Break has spent much of the past 2 years building infrastructure, such as the royalty-enforcing NFT ERC-721C standard and a tightly controlled ERC-20C token protocol. The bet is that what looks like a simple mobile title may eventually become the first blockchain-enabled game with strong logic around the accessibility, value and distribution of its assets.

Additional news

March 27th: Despite all the previous failed attempts, Pixels’ CEO Luke Barwikowski still believes play-to-earn can be a successful business strategy for scaling web3 games. In fact, the trick of the company’s launch of its Stacked platform is that he believes it can be a successful business strategy for scaling web2 games too.

That’s the reason Stacked will support a wide range of rewards, starting with Pixels’ PIXEL token, but in future, including any crypto, as well as gift cards and PayPal, if that’s how users want to take their rewards. The advantage of crypto is that it can be cashed out immediately and with smaller withdrawal limits than the other options. In this manner, Stacked hopes to encourage adoption of its token.

Another key push will be getting more games and projects into the ecosystem. At present Pixels, Pixel Dungeons and Chubkins are live, with the likes of Ronin and Sleepagotchi primed to join. To really scale the platform, many more will be required, however; something Barwikowski hopes to encourage with Stacked’s SDK, which enables a simple integration, including as an unbranded white-label solution.

Throw into the mix its AI-based data analytics and economic model, and Stacked is already looking like the best attempt yet to get P2E working sustainably. Critics will say this isn’t a high bar, while enthusiasts will point to the two years Pixels has spent getting to this point as evidence that it’s darkest just before the dawn.

Additional news:

March 20th: One of the ironies of The Sandbox is what started out as a mobile game in 2012 has never had much of a solid mobile vision for its UGC blockchain platform. The platform’s complexity made it challenging to release as a mobile app, so the developer proposed releasing standalone games instead. But nothing ever came of this, until now.

The announcement of its NEXT game, which will enter playtesting from 26th March, is both a mark of the project’s new urgency and a return to its roots as a gaming platform rather than a metaverse for brands.

Built on Unreal Engine, as opposed to The Sandbox’s use of Unity, NEXT is a third-person battle royale game that will ship with two maps and auto-aim and auto-fire mechanics. It’s clearly an alpha version. Player will log in with their The Sandbox accounts with the option to use their existing avatars in-game. Players who complete the test’s missions will also be rewarded with a special duck avatar.

All other in-game activity will be wiped when the playtest ends on 5th April, but hopefully there will be many more playtests as NEXT gears up to its release. If nothing else, it’s already demonstrated a willing audience with over 30,000 people already signed up.

Additional news

March 13th: If you want to play the long game, you have to create long games. Indeed, that’s always been a strong criticism of play-to-earn games. Those experiences just haven’t been deep enough in terms of their long-term demands, whether that be the required time, skills or monetization.

However, no-one doubts the demands of MMORPGs, which for better or worse have become full-time occupations for some players. And maybe that’s something blockchain will eventually enable, at least when it comes to their earning elements.

Likely that remains some years off, but the efforts being made by companies such as Wemade and CCP Games suggest it may not be as far away as many people think. Certainly, games such as Wemade’s Night Crows and CCP Games’ EVE Frontier are amongst the most complex blockchain games ever developed.

Night Crows is the more established experience. It’s celebrating its second anniversary with a NFT-gated metagame event called NFT Crusades that will reward its top players with a new currency used to buy limited-edition gear. EVE Frontier is still in development, of course. This week it launched its fifth three-month cycle and its two-week $80,000 Hackathon. It’s also the first time the game has started using the Sui blockchain, which it hopes will provide the perfect platform for players and creators to make a universe that will last for decades.

Additional news

March 6th: We’re currently in the situation whereby tokens are both the promise and the Achilles heel of blockchain gaming. Success for any blockchain game is getting its token to be worth something. However, with all tokens down 90% from their all-time highs, it’s no surprise that there’s little interest in buying, let alone investing, in such assets.

But perhaps hope is emerging. One safe move is to ditch volatile tokens altogether, instead adopting stablecoins as your main payment system. This is what Mythical Games is now implementing, moving all the NFTs from its sports games like NFL Rivals and FIFA Rivals to its new USDC-based Pulse Market. This transition means that all the games in Mythical’s ecosystem will now have a stable foundation for trading; something that’s particularly important for FIFA Rivals with the 2026 World Cup mere months away.

As for the question of whether gamers are interested in new tokens, risk-to-earn RPG Cambria suggests some level of appetite remains. It’s just sold $1 million, 10% of total supply, of its new RSGP token to fans. Launching in June, it’s notable that the token won’t be used as a currency, rather as a loyalty system with holding and staking reducing cash-out fees and enabling governance voting.

Web3 streaming platform Thousands has also announced its THOU token this week. It’s not clear when it will go live but it’s following a community rewards model. Players involved with PC MOBA Wildcard, which is the launch title on Thousand, can start stacking their XP now.

Additional news

February 27th: It’s been a long time since blockchain games generated any good news about funding or token prices, but this week we had both. It was announced that Bitkraft had invested $3 million into Power Protocol’s POWER token, which is used in mobile APRG Fableborne and gambling platform High Rollers. The news further boosted the already-rising price of POWER, which jumped 278%.

As is the way with these speculative boosts, the price is now coming back down. It’s still up over 1,600% from its December launch, though, suggesting that gaming tokens aren’t completely dead. CHECK, GUN, and AXS have also seen decent rises during 2026, albeit off all-time lows for the latter two.

The more significant news of the week, however, is likely to be the launch of Sky Mavis’ bAXS token, which is the first implementation of the Apptoken protocol in Axie Infinity. It’s functionally equivalent to AXS within the game’s ecosystem in every way, except one — the ability to cash it out.

The only way to do this is to swap bAXS for AXS, at which point the protocol imposes an exchange tax paid into the game’s treasury. This ranges from 85% to 17.5%, dependent on a user’s Axie Score, which is broadly akin to a reputation system. This means, for the first time, Sky Mavis can give away in-game token rewards without crashing the token’s price. It’s already testing the process, airdropping 100,000 bAXS tokens.

And with protocol creator Limit Break working to release its new LBAMM cross-chain swap infrastructure, we’ll hopefully see a lot more games implementing these new controls to better separate and define the utility and the speculative functionality of their tokens.

Additional news

February 20th: Can The Sandbox regain past glories? I don’t know but it looks like Season 7, which is launching next week, is a step in the right direction.

For one thing, it’s dropped the “alpha” labelling, which suggests progress. Some of the experiences will also be available to play direct from your web browser, without any downloads or log-ins. That adds accessibility. Finally, the focus is now on community-made content rather than the big brands that have previously dominated proceedings. Even if this means the quality isn’t as high, hopefully this will result in a more varied and imaginative collection of games. We’ll find out more on Wednesday.

Another announcement demonstrating thoughtfulness is Gigaverse’s GIGABIT currency, which is less a crypto token and more of a payment system; one that redistributes value outflows back towards player rewards. But if GIGABIT is boring in terms of its design, that’s because high-risk, high-reward speculative elements are already baked into Gigaverse, so they don’t also need to be contained within the game’s token price.

Other news:

February 13th

What’s your P(doom)? Eliza Labs’ Shaw Walters lays it out straight. He doesn’t believe in a number. It’s going to be the best and the worst of times simultaneously, he reckons. So why’s he spending his time using AI agents to build HyperScape AI, a new version of RuneScape, which will include onchain elements?

“What I’m really focused on is agents that get you your time back and agents that can play games, because I think that playing games is the path to agents that do the real work,” he says.

It seems likely that plenty of people will be testing that thesis in the forthcoming EVE Frontier hackathon. Curated with Mysten Labs, the game, which runs on its Sui, will be offering $80,000 in terms of rewards for the best projects, which can span in-game assets to external utilities and tools. The action starts on 11th March. You can apply here.

Finally, it’s game over for Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander Larsen, who, having helped build Axie Infinity and Ronin, and survived a $600 million North Korean hack, is leaving the company to focus on his young family and turn his professional attention to the defense sector.

February 6th

What a week. Bitcoin flirted with $60,000 and ETH is still sub-$2,000. Gold and silver yo-yo’ed in the wind, while SaaS stocks were smacked right down, and for much of the weekend, the eyes of the internet were fixed on a non-human version of Reddit.

Yes, the AI juggernaut continues to accelerate, forcing us to rethink many previous certainties. The confusion shows no signs of abating any time soon.

Maybe we should just jump in and enjoy the show. That’s what Animoca Brands is hoping we’ll be doing, as it announced Animoca Minds. Built on top of CryptoSlam’s Ethoswarm protocol, Animoca Minds plans to provide everyone with their own AI agent to help when it comes to onchain activities such as trading, as well as interacting with other agents on Moltbook, and other agentic networks.

Details are sparse, but it will launch with support for EVM chains and apparently use a hybrid version of GPT and Antropic LLMs, which sounds very expensive for what seems likely to be a (mainly) free product to consumers. Sign up now to find out more.

In other AI news, MapleStory Universe developer Nexpace has signed a deal to integrate AI game-making platform Verse8 into its ecosystem. The goal is to help users make compelling short-form content using MapleStory IP. Also, highlighting trends in web3 gaming, GOAT Gaming is shutting down all its blockchain activity, with developer Wearemighty focusing on its AI production tools, instead.

But the week wasn’t just about AI. In his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, Jon spoke to Chris Gonsalves, the CEO of Forkast, about building an onchain prediction market for emerging markets, with a particular focus on esports.

January 30th: This week’s roundup is a special edition that examines the evolving relationship between Animoca Brands and The Sandbox, which it acquired for $5 million in 2018. At its peak in 2022, however, The Sandbox was worth multiple billions of dollars, boosting Animoca’s own valuation in the process.

Now, things are very different. Still worth around $2 billion, Animoca’s business is based on its crypto consulting and token advice activities, plus a big chunk of crypto reserves and over 600 investments. Blockchain gaming in general, and The Sandbox in particular, only make up a minor part of this.

So what happened?

January 23rd

What are all those Casual Degen game developers doing among the top 20? Which developer made the biggest leap? What determines someone’s placement? And most importantly – who’s first?

This and plenty more are up for discussion in today’s roundup as we walk you through the creme de la creme of blockchain gaming companies that made the cut to our Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies 2026 list, which was revealed live at PG Connects London earlier this week.

In additional headlines, we also talk about the $40 million Series C funding round announced by Bitcoin payment company ZBD.

Other news

January 16th

This week, three company acquisitions were announced in blockchain gaming. 

However, each of these deals had their own flavor. 

The only classic consolidation deal was Polygon, which paid a rumored $125 million to buy Sequence. The reason for the price was that Sequence was a company with well-used technology, dozens of clients and proper revenues. This was combined with the fact that Polygon is actively scaling its own operations to ride the stablecoin payment explosion. 

Besides Sequence, Polygon also bought Bitcoin ATM and crypto payments company Coinme. The total cost of these deals was $250 million; substantial even for a blockchain with a token marketcap of $1.5 billion. 

Cartridge’s acquisition of UK studio Playmint feels more like an acquihire. Both companies share an investor in Bitkraft and both companies are also deep into fully onchain game infrastructure. Playmint worked on various games but none were formally launched, leaving it as a R&D experiment. That has some added value for Cartridge’s Dojo engine, but the terms of the deal weren’t revealed so it’s impossible to know how much value. 

Finally Animoca Brands acquisition of SOMO is the one that has everyone scratching their heads. Animoca hasn’t been investing in third party games for years, and SOMO doesn’t have a good reputation. Nevertheless, a deal has been done. No doubt, additional facts will be announced in due course.

Other news

January 9th

First week back at work and there have already been some difficult announcements. After exploring all possibilities, Hunters On Chain developer BoomLand has announced it’s shutting down. However, the game itself will remain live for 2026. Perhaps that provides an opportunity for someone else to take it over.

More symbolic than significant, Sky Mavis has announced the SLP token will stop being given away as a reward in Axie Infinity: Origins. The reason is the level of bot extraction. SLP will still be required for crafting and other in-game features though. The news is symbolic as SLP was the successful first play-to-earn token. But if nothing else, it’s a reminder that all extractive value in a blockchain game has to be matched with a balancing input cost, otherwise bots and AI agents will eat your economy.

There was some good news too. Mythical Games has launched its new Pulse platform, which as well as featuring NFT trading using stablecoins, also includes a paid tournament system called Pulse Arena. The first live game is Pudgy Party, which uses the PENGU token on the Abtrast blockchain. An example tournament charges $3 entry for a possible $94 top reward.

January 2nd

Happy New Year. At least it can’t be any worse than 2025 was for blockchain gaming. Or are we being too pessimistic? After all, you can’t discover what works until you know what doesn’t work. And we certainly had many examples of this last year.

But there were some small green shoots of growth too in terms of degen-focused games such as LOL Land, Fishing Frenzy, Cambria and Gigaverse. These will attempt to expand in 2026, although it’s not clear they can ever be more than profitable niches. In contrast, the few blockchain games with a vision for mass audiences are hiding their blockchain features to smooth their UX. Keep an eye on MapleStory N and FIFA Rivals to see how they fare this year.

If blockchain games are to experience a sea change in adoption, AI agents will be key – at least that’s what Jon thinks. Despite the technology failing to spark in 2025, he remains bullish, pointing out AI agents fix most of the issues that blockchain games are experiencing. Indeed, he argues that with most game developers hostile to the impact of AI, blockchain games are the best placed part of the gaming sector to take advantage of this new technology’s evident potential. Is he correct? See you in 12 months time.

December 12th

If you’re building a platform for user-generated content, does it matter what the UGC actually is? 

That could be one of the questions to ask The Sandbox, which while still working on its eponymous Roblox-with-blockchain gaming platform, has now launched its much more lightweight Corners experience, into invite-only beta. 

This is designed around users collecting and curating URLs on various topics, spending crypto to buy each Corner’s memecoin and spending it to upvote the best content, earning SAND token in return. 

The point of this simple Reddit-with-blockchain is to leverage the wider liquidity of the SAND token, and make it a token that is associated more widely with the creator economy. The harder question to answer is whether the lightweight nature of the experience is sufficient to keep people engaged beyond the rewards. 

Animoca Brands is grappling with similar motivational issues with the launch of MocaProof, its ID reputation platform that’s part of the wider Moca Network. It’s just gone live, allowing users to start verifying some onchain actions and hence levelling up their Mocapet, which is the representation of their activity and reputation. As ever, the rarer the Mocapet, the better the rewards, which in this case will be MOCA tokens and AIR’s SP stablecoin-pegged offchain reward currency. 

Away from platforms, some companies are still launching actual products, or games as we like to call them. Gamedia and Immutable have launched the updated version of 3v3 brawler Spider Tanks on Epic Games Store and mobile app stores. 

Meanwhile, CCP Games has launched PC MMOG EVE Frontier into Cycle 4, with a new manual control method for ships being the headline change, although there are plenty more if you check the patchnotes. 

Another game with changes is Soccerverse, which thanks to its new FIFPRO license now has access to the names and likenesses of over 65,000 realworld players. 

Finally the Blockchain Game Alliance released its 2025 report based on survey responses from over 500 members. 66% of them are extremely or somewhat optimistic about the year ahead!

Other news

December 5th

Does blockchain win with a bang or a whimper?

If the quiet adoption of stablecoins is anything to go by, you’ll have to listen carefully in the build up, but the final victory march will be deafening. That’s the feeling from the news that Sony is preparing to launch its own USD-backed stablecoin, which is expected to be used by the likes of PlayStation Network, Crunchyroll and Sony Music.

On the gaming front, the big news this week was on Ronin where Fableborne Season 4 is live until 5th January, and where Craft World launched its collab with Fishing Frenzy. You can also play EVE Frontier for free until 9th December.

Looking forward to 2026, cross-platform action-RPG Myths will be going live with its NFT trading on the Mythical Market; the first third party game to gain access to the platform.

Finally, UK studio Footium raised $600,000 from investors including Dimitar Berbatov to continue to build up and scale its Arbitrum-based football management game.

Other news:

November 28th

As we’re approaching the end of 2025, it’s obvious the web3 games market has changed – not because it wanted to but because it had to. Investment has dried up, with fewer and smaller rounds announced.

But projects are still getting funded. South Korean developer Ndus Interactive announced this week it’s raised $1.6 million for pop extraction shooter Xociety, bringing total funding to more than $8 million. Xociety is launching on Epic Games Store for PCs, as well as on the SuiPlay0X1 handheld, on Saturday, November 29th.

Tighter budgets have forced multiple studios to close or pivot over the past two years. One of the latter is South Korea-based Delabs Games which initially worked on a range of web3 PC games. Moving to web3 mobile midcore games built for messaging apps such as Telegram and Line in 2024, it’s recently pivoted further towards genAI. For this endeavor it’s brought in the hand of Planetarium CEO JC Kim, who when speaking to Jon Jordan about his wider AI vision said he thinks genAI can reduce game development costs by up to 90%. Good news for demanding game budgets. 

In terms of Planetarium’s AI game-creation platform Verse8, it’s now live in beta letting users remix or “spin” existing projects to create their own games.

MapleStory Universe’s developer Nexpace (also South Korean) – Nexon’s web3 division – announced this week it’s planning to burn $1.7 million worth of NXPC tokens. Part of a regular programme which will burn tokens quarterly, the aim is to reduce the circulating token supply by around 20%. 

In the first burn which took place on Thursday, November 27th, 3.8 million NXPC tokens were burnt – 1.7% of the circulating supply.

Other news

November 21st

As web3 games and services continue to recoup, streamline, or even shut down, the ones that last become fewer, and inevitably better. 

As CCP Games (EVE Frontier) CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson summarised it in this week’s Mavens feature, “Many of the games I have seen in the space tend to be very focused on the extrinsic, often called financial aspects, which tends to leave them with underdeveloped and reductive intrinsic motivations to interact with the game or world.”

“By focusing more on the creation of i) world, ii) the emergent economy that arises from players needing to coordinate their efforts for world domination, the whole stack needs to be built carefully and masterfully from the ground up. Only once all that has been achieved, financialization might make sense as the top layer.”

Being an established developer and raising a significant amount of funding initially certainly helps in times of drought, giving studios leeway to find product market fit and figure out more sustainable models.

Nexon’s web3 affiliate Nexpace is such an example. Following the launch of its MapleStory N MMORPG in May, it’s now announced a $50 million strong ecosystem fund. Hoping to grow both MapleStory N and its broader MapleStory Universe ecosystem, it marks a significant expansion beyond gaming, including areas like digital finance and AI. 

Fellow South Korean game company Wemade has seen equally strong tailwinds with its blockchain-enabled MMORPG Legend of Ymir. Selling out the first ten of its Partner Server slots letting users run their own game servers – to a price range of $20,000 to $30,000 – Wemade will now offer more flexible options in the shape of Mini, Lite and Origin, which will differ in server size, operational style and price.

Less-financially-backed web3 game developer Hytopia shows visions and ambitions can become reality even without hundreds of millions. This week Jon Jordan spoke with co-founder Maxwell Holmes about how the “Roblox-with-blockchain UGC platform” puts fun first, and how it’s looking to build momentum following the launch of its HYBUX token.

More news

November 14th

One of the ways in which the blockchain game sector is maturing is that some companies are much more actively talking about banning accounts, rather than how many accounts they have.

Leading that charge is Nexon’s web3 arm Nexpace which announced that it’s banned over 640,000 accounts in MapleStory N and the wider MapleStory Universe ecosystem for activities ranging from botting and running in-game macros to buying other people’s already KYC’ed accounts.

To put this into some sort of comparison, the company announced 1.75 million lifetime accounts for the project in October.

The point of such announcements is to demonstrate how seriously Nexpace takes maintaining a level playing field in its MMORPG for all human players. To some extent, then, the large the number of banned accounts, the better.

Another company thinking about player numbers is Sky Mavis, which has tweaked the AXS rewards system for Axie Infinity, making it more complex and harder to extract value. No surprise that the initial result was a 45% drop in DAUWs, although it has recovered somewhat since.

But like Nexpace, the move is part of a growing realization that raw numbers are vanity items for businesses that in the long term need to be generating profits.

More news:

November 7th

Crypto sentiment may be on the way down but blockchain gaming is still striving towards the future, with the big news this week that billion-dollar consumer web3 outfit Animoca Brands has taken the first steps towards a possible Nasdaq listing.

The bad news is that its reverse merger with existing company Currenc is going to take another 9-12 months to clear all the regulations required to complete such a deal. Still, at least that will give us plenty to talk about in 2026.

More bad news came from the announcement that cosy RPG Moonfrost is going pure web2 as it refocuses on a paid Steam launch in 2026. However, the project hasn’t totally lost its web3 confidence with CEO Ric Moore also announcing degen risk-to-earn platform Frost Arcade, which will offer deterministic mini-games with casino-style onchain rewards.

Things are more positive at Immutable, which has seen its IMX token become the first big gaming token to be fully unlocked, meaning there will be no new token inflation. Whether that has any impact on price in the short-term seems unlikely though.

Immutable’s other big news was its deal with Gamedia, which will see its arena shooter Spider Tanks rebooted on Immutable, entering early access for PC and mobile from 8th December.

More news

October 31st

While crypto sceptics immerse themselves in headlines of Uptober turning into Downtober, it’s been noticeable that web3 gaming is playing a different game, mostly independent of broader crypto volatility. That can be both a flaw and a feature.

Web3 games are shifting focus and character due to a lot of (failed) experimentation around product-market-fit. We see a strong differentiation between games not focusing on being a source of money generating at all, and on the other hand fully degen games, which focuses their potential for big earning, with the risk element that you might also lose your money. 

Strong examples of the former include EVE Frontier, but you could also add Soccerverse, Craft World and Wemade’s Legend of Ymir, which launched globally this week. Essentially these are games with blockchain elements that have more than just financial goals.

The other degen category are games built on a gambling-like model, with titles like LOL Land, Gigaverse and Cambria being prime examples. This week Cambria announced a $2 million funding round led by Bitkraft and Sky Mavis, which follows a successful land NFT sale hitting $1.3 million in volume. Meanwhile, YGG’s Abstract-based LOL Land has now generated $6.5 million in revenue during its five months since launch, with the pace increasing as the LOL token launch approaches.

Other news hitting the radar this week included Yuga Labs launching the first official version of its open-world always-on Otherside metaverse, with the browser experience going live on 12th November. Initially it’s releasing Koda Nexus, a social hub and the central experience for Otherside, with more games and experiences further down the line.

With this week’s launch of Chapter 3, Pixels has returned to its roots “with rapid updates, experimentation, and fast iteration”, according to CEO Luke Barwikowski. Something as unique as a game still aspiring to solve the play-to-earn dilemma by hitting a sustainable return-on-reward spend ratio, Pixels is a rare example neither suited in the degen or deeper utility focused category, it seems a rare example of a game finding a balance between both. 

Tune in to the full conversation for some more alpha about Pixels, and return in a week for an interview with Barwikowski.

Other news

October 24th

Blink and you missed it but this week was London Blockchain Week and so Jon dutifully made his way down to the big smoke to moderate a panel at Zebu Live 2025.

Entitled What Is Actually Working For Web3 Games?, the discussion covered themes oft also discussed in our weekly roundup in recent weeks, notably the bifurcation of blockchain games into:

  • Casual Degen experiences such as YGG’s LOL Land and GOAT Gaming’s GrabGifts.
  • Onchain composability games such as EVE Frontier, MapleStory Universe, Craft World, Gigaverse etc.

The vast bulk of free-to-play NFT+token blockchain games have disappeared. The economic model just didn’t work.

This is something also highlighted in our monthly Mavens’ opinion piece covering the key trends in blockchain gaming in 2025. Of course, YGG’s Gabby Dizon and EVE Frontier’s Hilmar Veigar Petursson argued their respective corners.

Also this week, PC 2v2 MOBA deck builder Wildcard went into early access on Steam. It’s a pure web2 game but with a fully featured web3 esports ecosystem via its Thousands platform.

Jon is also enjoying playing RavenQuest companion game RavenIdle, itself another example of how to rework a blockchain game into a more accessible web2 experience to improve onboarding.

Other news:

October 17th

What blockchain you built on used to be a big deal, and maybe in some situations it still is. 

For example, last week CCP Games announced that its in-dev MMOG EVE Frontier was moving from its EVM testnet to Sui because Sui’s object-oriented structure was better aligned to its composability goals.

Similarly, Sorare has just migrated all its NFTs from EVM-based StarkEx blockchain to Solana. Maybe that had something to do with the technical aspects of Solana’s block times and gas fees. Probably, it had a lot more to do with Solana’s reputation as a hotbed of degen asset traders.

As for MapleStory Universe, at the moment it’s highlighting how its new Chainlink integration will allow future builders to plug any supported L1 blockchain into its Avalanche-based Henesys blockchain.

In this way, Henesys will remain the ecosystem’s core chain but assets – and experiences – could seamlessly operate on other blockchains without any security issues.  

In other news, it’s expected that Mythical Games will announce its Series D funding round next week. The news has been pre-announced by tiny US DAT outfit Eightco, which is one of the company’s new investors. It seems that Eightco is trying to boost its stock price by press releasing the news ahead of Mythical’s own announcement. 

Eightco only got into the picture because it’s raised $270 million to buy Worldcoin’s WLD token. Worldcoin is also investing into Mythical, something further supported as its Mythos platform will be integrating Worldcoin’s proof of humanity tech. 

Other news

October 3rd

The big discussion point in this week’s podcast was the announcement of SANDchain. Building on the liquidity of the SAND token, this plans to be a payment/rewards blockchain for creators and their communities; something like an onchain Patreon. 

The interesting question is how connected SANDchain will be – or should be – to The Sandbox? Clearly it’s designed to be connected but also separate from The Sandbox, trying to attract YouTube, Twitch and TikTok creators, perhaps even developers of games for Roblox and mobile app stores. 

But will these creators be interested in sharing their communities and launching memecoins?

Looking at some data-based news, Pudgy Party has hit one million downloads via app stores, driving the Mythos blockchain to an onchain all-time-high in terms of onchain activity during 2025. However, the MYTH token remains near its all-time-low. 

In funding news, India-based web3 gaming rewards platform KGeN raised $13.5 million, taking its total funding to $43.5 million. Ahead of its token launch, it claims 66 million monthly users. 

Also discussed is the beta launch of South Korean outfit Overtake’s web2/3 game item marketplace on the Sui blockchain. This is interesting as the team has been operating web2 game marketplaces in Korea for a decade and are now looking to juice and streamline the experience with blockchain payment rails and the TAKE token. 

Jon also continues his dialogue about what’s happening with Pirate Nation and why Proof of Play was right to shut down the main game and its blockchains, which were losing $150,000 a month. Indeed, the new arcade mode of Pirate Nation’s battle system has already generated $500,000 in two months on Abstract. 

Other news

September 26th

The good news this week was there’s a lot of talk about new games and exciting roadmaps.

More generally, the discussion in the podcast revolved around fundamental issues such as how blockchain games can divorce the inherently real-world value of their in-game assets with the speculative nature of their communities.

This was underlined by the ongoing drama around the shutdown of Pirate Nation and some whales’ presumption about how much they should be rewarded for their historic reckless speculation. Perhaps not unrelated, degen KOL and serial pre-token investor Grail said he was leaving game token investing to focus on DeFi projects.

Other news:

September 19th

Whether or not you treat the term “degen” as a badge of honor or a mark of Cain, there’s no disputing the rise of degen crypto gaming over the past 12 months.

In part this is a byproduct of the strength of crypto trends and prices more generally, and in part the failure of traditional blockchain gaming.

But amid the inevitable booms and busts, some degen games are demonstrating they are finding audiences and revenues, especially on the Abstract blockchain, where players also get to earn Abstract XP in hopes of a forthcoming token airdrop.

The two games in the vanguard are RPG Gigaverse and casual degen title LOL Land, which have announced $5.5 million and $2.5 million of lifetime revenue.

Gigaverse is now looking to take its simple dungeon-crawling gameplay and extend it out with an open world experience. Its own development is also backed by third party builders in the Gigaverse Hub; something which is key to its vision of becoming a ‘universe of universes”.

As for LOL Land, its developer YGG Play is expanding its own horizons with the news that it is publishing Delabs Games’ Gigachadbat baseball game on Abstrast. Itwas originally launched in Telegram.

Other news

September 12th

Almost two weeks into Sleepy September, although it might be better described as “transitional” with anticipation for Q4 creeping up.

As web2 PC card collectible MOBA Wildcard is approaching its October launch, it has accumulated 75,000 wishlists on Steam. Playful Studios has also released more details about the game’s wider web3 ecosystem, contained within the Thousands community platform.

Alongside its interactive streaming tech and esports elements embedded with Wildcard assets, a new introduction is the Wildcard Fantasy League. The details are altogether clear, but broadly this will allow KYC’ed users to sponsor certain in-game characters, using the ecosystem’s WC token. If a character is drafted into the game’s season, its sponsor will receive a signing bonus and a cut of that character’s in-game winnings.

Elsewhere, a web3 game defying the slow tide and demonstrating strong momentum is mobile battle royale game Pudgy Party. A joint venture from Pudgy Penguins headco Igloo and Mythical Games, it launched globally on August 29th, less than two weeks ago and has hit 500,000 downloads via app stores. For reference, Mythical’s FIFA Rivals, launched in June 2025, did 1 million downloads in its first seven weeks. 

Initially launched by Yuga Labs in 2023 and acquired by Faraway Games in 2024, the HV-MTL collection has been bought by Adam Weitsman, an entrepreneur who also acquired the Golden Key NFT from Yuga’s Dookey Dash game for $1 million in 2023. Working with web3 dev Gabe8bit, Weitsman is planning to include the collection in Yuga’s forthcoming Otherside metaverse. 

Other news

September 5th

Transitioning from a farming game into a gaming-oriented DeFi staking ecosystem, Pixels has lost the largest number of DAUWs in 2025. Down to 25,000 daily active wallets, the game is approaching its second anniversary on Ronin, a network itself undergoing major changes.

Nothing new under the sun when it comes to the current state of web3 games, in other words. On a more positive note, MapleStory Universe and its MapleStory N continues to see steady growth, despite recently banning 20,000 bot accounts. 

Following a busy launch month in August, Voya Games’ idle resource mobile/browser game Craft World has released its first partner event, in collaboration with fellow Ronin NFT collection Ronke. The event comes with a new range of resources, which are collected and used to level up factories or contribute to three masterpiece items. Rewards are offered in the form of Ronke’s RICE token, Craft World’s Water Dyno NFTs and RON tokens.

Noting the recent momentum of degen games such as LOL Land on Abstract and Cambria and Fishing Frenzy on Ronin, GLHF announced it’s raised $2.3 million to support the expansion of Gigaverse. Running on the Abstract blockchain using Proof of Play’s tech stack, Gigaverse is also selling Gigaverse Eggs NFTs on OpenSea, which will carry over into the Gigaverse open world when it launches.

Following last week’s rumors that The Sandbox might become a token launchpad (among other claims), the news of Moca Network’s $20 million MocaPortfolio rewards campaign is interesting. MocaPortfolio aims to drop ongoing rewards to MOCA stakers and holders of Mocaverse NFTs in the form of tokens from Animoca Brands’ investment and partner companies, starting with Magic Eden’s ME token in Q4.

Now with three mobile games live – NFL Rivals, FIFA Rivals and Pudgy Party, how is Mythical’s Mythos ecosystem faring in terms of onchain activity? As expected, it’s booming. Are we seeing the start of that long desired goal of 100 million wallets?

Other news

August 29th

Not announced in the way either Animoca Brands’ nor its subsidiary The Sandbox would have wished, nonetheless, this week the news broke, preceded by rumors, of a major restructuring plan for The Sandbox.

A seemingly annoyed Yat Siu, the executive chairman of Animoca Brands, set the record straight in his opinion in a Cointelegraph live stream, confirming something while contextualizing other claims.

From now on, The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget will officially be the global ambassador, also working on “a special project related to the SAND token and The Sandbox” which will be announced in a few months.

The other co-founder, Arthur Madrid, has become chairman, while Animoca’s Robby Yung is stepping in as CEO. As such he will bring “The Sandbox to the next stage, building it up to something much stronger than it was before” according to Siu. 

Yung has a big task ahead of him. The mission is to spark new life and confidence into a project that’s lost momentum. This means branding The Sandbox as something different, yet something that takes advantage of its “very liquid SAND token”. Siu’s take that everything is a memecoin, a notion the power of internet virality is affirming day-by-day, is a good start.

Onto a game that’s looking to leverage exactly that flywheel of IP virality, Pudgy Party. Launching globally via app stores today (Friday 29th August) the game is only one part of the wider Pudgy Penguins’ ecosystem. 

With plushies and animations based on the original NFT collection already proving successful, Luca Netz’s and Mythical Games’ joint vision is to drive 100 million downloads with Pudgy Party through web3, KOL collabs, and most recently, a launch partnership with Roblox’s 15 million player-strong Steal a Brainrot. 

Looking to materialise the long term plan to decentralize Axie Infinity from Sky Mavis, the Axie Infinity Constitution has been unveiled. The 5-page proposal defines how the Axie Infinity Decentralized Autonomous Organization (the Axie DAO) is established and who can become Citizens of Axie Infinity, with the ability to vote on proposals from the DAO.

The constitution will be up for vote for current Axie Citizens, those holding at least one AXS token or Axie NFT, starting from Monday 1st September and ending seven days later.

Other news

August 22nd

Another blockchain game is closing down but while Proof of Play’s fully onchain title Pirate Nation will only be around for another month or so, the company lives on with a new focus on profitable operations and its PIRATE token.

The reasons for the shutdown are many but the crux of the matter appears to be that Pirate Nation’s token-incentivized seasons generated so many players that Proof of Play felt it had to launch its own blockchains to handle the traffic. However, once it stopped giving away tokens, traffic dropped significantly, meaning that the costs of running these blockchains – $150,000 a month – become prohibitive. The result was the game and the chains are being shut down.

Perhaps Pirate Nation players will take comfort from Splinterlands’ Crypto Games Recovery Fund, which is giving away $500,000 of in-game assets over the coming seven years to encourage players of defunct blockchain games to onboard to the TCG, which itself is one of the longest running web3 experiences, launching in 2018.

More positive news came from Zillion Whales, which is working hard to reboot its Ronin-based strategy game Wild Forest, which has also now launched on the Epic Games Store. New features and a possible esports tournament are some of the reasons that its WF token is up over 400% in the past months, althought it’s still down 80% from its December 2024 launch price.

Additional news

August 15th

Emerging from stealth in July, MMOG veteran John Smedley and his new studio Distinct Possibility unveiled Reaper Actual. 

Setting the tone as doing things differently, Reaper Actual is built on Tezos-based L2 Etherlink, which is uncommon in web3 games circles. Reaper Actual is a PC-based persistent open-world shooter – “a mix between a first-person shooter and an MMORPG, a completely new kind of game that we hope is going to be the start of a new genre”, as Smedley describes it – hoping to attract both web2 and web3 players. As such it will launch as a web2 game via Steam and Epic Games Store, with a separate web3 version dropping via its own website. Jon recently sat down for a conversation with Smedley unpacking all the details on how this will work practically, the studio’s use of AI, Tezos, funding, and more.

Announcing $20 million in funding in today’s investment climate would usually generate a wave of bullish social media posts and headlines. However, in the case of Neon Machine, which this week unveiled $19.5 million raised for Shrapnel, the reception was a dismal sign of lost momentum. Nothing new, the game has continued to struggle for some time for many reasons, all underpinned by an ongoing legal dispute. In a surprise move, the developer recently announced it’s leaving Avalanche, the network it’s built its own game infrastructure on for over five years, to instead join Gala Games’ GalaChain. That move was preceded by the news that the game will launch on China’s official blockchain, the first overseas web3 game to do so.

While an abundance of blockchain games are shutting down or throwing in the towel, others are testing new waters. It’ll be intriguing to see if new funding from Gala can keep Shrapnel above the surface. 

Finally, two and a half weeks after launching on Ronin, the almost fully onchain game Craft World is dominating transactions on the blockchain, despite only 1,000 daily active players. 

Additional news

August 8th

Impacted by a significantly dried-up market, 2025 has meant numerous web3 games have shut down. Others are pivoting to web2, building infrastructure, AI-driven games, or something else. 

Not stating openly it’s because of funding, but in a surprise move nevertheless, TCG Cross The Ages announced in July it was moving from Immutable to Solana. The migration is now completed and Cross The Ages is looking to roll out a range of new features as it prepares for Season 4.

With its own YGG token close to an all-time low, Yield Guild Games claims its Abstract-based degen game LOL Land generated $176,000 on Sunday 3rd August, and it’s already used some of the profits, spending 135 ETH, to buy back $518,000-worth of YGG, with the token’s price rising a modest 10%.

But while market conditions remain tough and few will prove resilient enough to come out better for it, we’ve looked at three blockchain games that actually work. More importantly, the questions to ask are why they work and what we can learn from these games.

Another developer seemingly making web3 work through intentional integration is Mythical Games and its FIFA Rivals. Recently exceeding 1 million downloads via Google Play and App Store, we checked in with Mythical CEO John Linden about the game, players’ reactions to some of its more surprising features, and what’s next.

Finally, while some of us have spent the week increasing our step count in the Cumbrian fells, others have been busy announcing new deals and partnerships. Notably, Animoca Brands

  • Announced a partnership with AMGI Studios to support the adoption of PC shooter My Pet Hooligan
  • Is applying for a stablecoin issuer license in Hong Kong, together with strategic partner companies
  • Unveiled new vault marketplace Nuva, which aims to connect real-world asset issuers with investors
  • In partnership with Coin Operated Group, it has made another strategic investment into Cool Cats, making Animoca a majority shareholder in Cool Cats Group

Other headlines

1st August

The hard work really starts when your game goes live and that’s what developer Voya Games and players of Craft World are now dealing with. Technical issues meant the launch was delayed by a day and – as ever – some people have been complaining that they thought they were going to get more free money when the DynoCoin token went live on Ronin.

This is despite Voya clearly stating that DynoCoin is a transaction token that only has utility to buy more in-game resources. Indeed, there’s technically an unlimited supply and the price is designed to continually go down.

In that context, the news players will have to buy a $8 Pro Account if they want to move tokens out-of-the-game is actually good for the game’s sustainability as it will limit the extractive power of bots, although also likely impacting the size of the playerbase. But as we’ve seen from games such as Pixels, restricting players selling off your token is the only way to go. Better to be strict from the beginning.

Other news saw Mythical Games announcing that FIFA Rivals has already been downloaded more than 1 million times. Its forthcoming Pudgy Party is out due out in August and some NFTs are already live on the Mythical Market.

Other headlines:

25th July

The only silver lining to the news that Tokyo Games Foundation is shutting down launch game TOKYO BEAST on 24th August, is the controlled way in which the game is being closed down. The foundation has allocated $350,000 in USDC compensation to NFT holders and is also refunding IAPs.

Nevertheless, coming just six weeks after the game launched, it all suggests the rumored $20 million project was operating on an extremely positive forecast of its future success, something that needs to be addressed if the promised additional games in development are going to avoid the same fate.

Better news came from Delabs Games, which ahead of its DELABS token launch next week, revealed it had received additional funding, taking its lifetime total to $17.2 million.

Things were also busy at GOAT Gaming, which launched its Season 4 with new idle clicker Underground Pepe. This will reward players with various prizes including in-platform currency Crown, USDT, Telegram-based NFTs and even some iPads.

And with the launch of Off The Grid on Steam this week, and Reaper Actual’s future plans in mind, our Mavens discussed whether it makes sense to create a web2 version of a web3 game in order to launch on platforms which don’t allow blockchain.

Additional news included:

18th July

There’s always plenty of news happening around AI and AI agents and this week the web3 game companies making a noise were Delabs Games and Planetarium, and Saga and Crono Labs.

Delabs has announced it’s going to be making games using Planetarium’s genAI game-making platform called Verse 8. Indeed, Planetarium’s CEO JC Kim is also joining Delabs as co-CEO. As for Verse 8, it allows you to make multiplayer games that also have their own item economies.

Blockchain company Saga is also leaning into AI and agents, this time with Chrono Labs. Together they are launching the KEX platform, which will allow people and companies to make AI agents that can act onchain, as well as doing the usual chat stuff.

But it’s not just about AI this week. Things are happening right now. Fully onchain football game Soccerverse starts its Season 2 this weekend, while Voya Games’ Craft World is now confirmed to go live on the Ronin blockchain on Tuesday 29th July. This is when players of the Project Voyager campaign will also receive their DynoCoins airdrop.

Two projects that are reconsidering their strategy when it comes to giving away tokens are Sky Mavis, which is working on what it calls Ronin v2 tokenomics, and Yield Guild Games, which is shutting down its Guild Advancement Program when the current event ends. Both projects are looking to give away more rewards to more committed players, and hence fewer rewards to extractive users.

Additional news included:

4th July

Can EverQuest veteran John Smedley get web3 right? If nothing else, it’s good to see ambition.

Smedley’s co-founded startup Distinct Possibility Studios recently unveiled open-world persistent loot shooter Reaper Actual. In development for two years, the game has secured $30.5 million in funding, which was led by Bitkraft and Brevan Howard Digital. 

In terms of “doing web3 right”, the web3 version of Reaper Actual will deploy on Tezos’ EVM L2 Etherlink. As Smedley has said, the focus is the game itself, with web3 features such as the ability to own and trade NFT bases being an optional bonus. The version of the game released via Steam and Epic Games Store will be purely web2, however. Expected to release alpha in the coming weeks.

Three weeks following Mythical Games’ mobile football game FIFA Rivals going live, a significant feature enabling players to combine fragments into complete players has been added. Each completed player is ranked mythical, and consists of five fragments which can either be earned in-game or bought via Mythical Marketplace. Of course, the first ones have already been created and put up for sale, with the cheapest version of Lionel Messi being priced at $11,204.

In case you missed it, we also made a handy guide how to play FIFA Rivals.

Thanks to its LUMI token MegaDrop 1 now being live – although the token isn’t live yet – Ronin-based pixel MMORPG Lumiterra has seen a sharp uptick in dailies. Daily onchain activity spiked at over 300,000 DAUWs this week, accounting for around half of all combined activity on Ronin. This makes Lumiterra a clear leader in terms of most popular blockchain games, with other titles to podium in our July update including Alien Worlds and Axie Infinity.

In conjunction with fully onchain Minecraft-game Chunked version 2 dropping, Jon had a great conversation with Improbable co-founder and MSquared CEO Rob Whitehead about how faster blockchains and more onchain data can supercharge web3 gaming. In particular Whitehead explains how MSquared, which he calls “Amazon Web Services for virtual worlds” is building an underlying technology layer that’s going to allow virtual worlds to connect on a new level.

Lastly, alongside Delabs Games opening pre-regs for Ragnarok Libre, Jenny spoke to CEO Joonmo Kwon about his expectations for the game and how the forthcoming DELABS token launch will boost ecosystem growth.

Additional news from the week

27th June

Does the world need another blockchain? One could justify arguments in both ways. In the case of Moca Chain, an EVM L1 announced by Animoca Brands and Moca Foundation this week, the argument is that Moca Chain will provide chain-agnostic blockspace with the purpose of allowing users to verify their ID credentials without relying on centralized platforms, also maintaining control of the privacy of their data. Of course, it’s no coincidence the news comes ahead of Animoca Brands looking to IPO in the US.

One example of a game that would benefit from Moca Chain, or at least a robust identity and reputation system, is Nexon’s MapleStory N. Continuing to suffer from high bot activity, Nexon is now introducing Credit Levels, a system it hopes will discourage bad actors through barriers like a token requirement and KYC to access the game.

We’re not usually the ones to set a countdown before web2 game launches, but one of the most anticipated games with web3 connections via its Thousands platform, Playful Studios’ CCAG Wildcard, is launching on Steam in October. You bet we’re excited, even if Jon’s not sure he’s going to play it!

US web3 game startup Spekter Games, founded by ex-nWay Taehoon Kim, has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding. Decloaking with Telegram-based web3 roguelite Spekter Agency, the team also has a second game in development.

Following its Jurassic World-themed Alpha Season 5, The Sandbox has unveiled a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, which is set to headline its Alpha Season 6.

20th June

Dubbed by some web3 gaming’s ultimate meta casino game, tokens are a cornerstone to the very definition of web3 gaming. But their trajectory is changing, mainly due to a maturing sector, and refined by a few key developers…

Playful Studios, led by Paul Bettner, announced this week it’s raised $6.5 million from Arbitrum and Paradigm for Thousands and its associated web2 CCAG (collectible card action game) Wildcard. Growing token utility entirely based on community demand rather than hype, developer gains, or early investor prospects, its ecosystem token WC has been allocated 100% to its engaged community.

Voya Games’ Craft World is doing something similar. None of its forthcoming DynoCoins have been allocated to the dev team. The full pot is for the players themselves to be spent in return for other in-game resources. Of course it’s a crypto token and will be live through Ronin’s Katana DEX, but it’s not launching on major centralised exchanges, which immediately reduces the risk of a sinking token killing your game.

Yet one of the brightest examples of a team aspiring to create a more sustainable future for game tokens is Pixels. Initially confined to its own social RPG Pixels, the PIXEL token has now expanded to three more games, with two or three additional titles to be added soon. In conjunction with its expansion, PIXEL is now experiencing a significant turnaround in return-on-rewards, with tokens staked back into the ecosystem growing faster than the amount being rewarded to players. 

Five weeks after going live, Nexon’s PC MMORPG Maplestory N, which did launch its NXPC token via the world’s largest CEX Binance, continues to grow both in terms of user wallets and NFT trading on its Maplestory Universe marketplace. The latter is plateauing somewhat, but this week saw the most expensive NFT so far sell for $18,617.

Notably, since its token launch, NXPC has dropped 72%.

In not too long time, we may know more about Off The Grid’s actual metrics too, as Gunzilla Games has said the Gunz mainnet migration is due in the coming weeks. Despite a claimed number of 16.8 million player wallets having to wait a little longer, an initial bunch of 21,000 OG wallets already migrated have been granted the ability to trade their assets on thirdparty marketplaces such as OpenSea.

Like Maplestory N, Off The Grid’s GUNZ token launched – not exempt from controversy – via Binance earlier in 2025. Its price has dropped 79% since.

Lastly we take a look at the web3 game going hottest across our mobile devices since its launch eight days ago, FIFA Rivals – from first impressions to how it compares to NFL Rivals to its debated NFT features.

13th June

While Malcolm Gladwell’s famous statement “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness” has proven to be more fluid than an exact formula, it’s still the reality that most great achievements take a long time to perfect.

Today we’re shining a light on four such products – web3 games that have been built with careful intention, over many years, but which are now beginning to show their full potential.

First up is Mythical Games’ FIFA Rivals, which is now live through app stores.

This arcade experience also has players building – also levelling and training – a squad of real-world players, some of which can be tradable NFTs. Other in-game NFTs include licensed kits, balls, celebrations and club emblems. 

Also gone live this week is Project Voyager, which is the play-to-airdrop campaign for Voya Games’ Craft World. For the next four weeks, players collect – and spend – crystals to boost their leaderboard ranking. 

When Craft World goes live on the Ronin blockchain on 5th July, the top 25,000 ranked players will get an allocation of the game’s Dyno Coin.

CCP Games’ EVE Frontier has been live in its closed alpha for a number of months but this week, it wiped the universe and launched a new cycle, also allowing players to start talking about their experiences as it lifted its NDA.

The game will likely be building out for a number of years yet, but it’s great to see how CCP and other creators get creating this fully onchain survival space universe.

Finally, MapleStory N continues to break records, with over 1 million wallets active on its NFT marketplace, which has broken $13 million in lifetime trading volume. The most expensive NFT just sold for $13,451 too.

6th June

While we shouldn’t ignore the struggles of some web3 games – we opened the week talking about Dogami – we shouldn’t give into the temptation of hyping bad news for clicks either.

So to redress the balance, we’ve started a feature putting the spotlight on blockchain game successes. The first story is about Fishing Frenzy and its promising season 1 results.

No doubt, we’ll be highlighting FIFA Rivals’ future performance there too, given that Mythical Games’ mobile game is launching on Thursday 12th June. 

It could generate a great boost for the industry, with tens of millions of downloads possible. Notably, ahead of launch, Mythical has also unveiled a significant partnership with Adidas, and online football community One Football. 

Talking of good web3 games, nominations to the Pocket Gamer Mobile Game Awards 2025 are now live, with categories like ‘Best Use of Blockchain’, ‘Best Use of AI’, and ‘Best Game Innovation’.

CCP Games’ EVE Frontier has also dropped some exciting news with a new trailer going live on Sunday 8th June, in conjunction with the launch of its new era that also sees the lifting of its NDA for players to share their experiences thus far. 

Following its recent $5 million funding round, Voya Games is bringing fully onchain idle resource sim Craft World from Polygon testnet to Ronin mainnet in conjunction with the game launch in summer 2025. With Axie Infinity and Pixels being the only games with any substantial audience on Ronin, this partnership is likely to turn out a great move both for Voya and Sky Mavis.

A month after the launch of its new staking system, Pixels has seen another game, and the first one outside of Ronin, onboard its ecosystem. Due to launch on mobile later in Q2 2025, Sleepagotchi is the fourth game alongside Pixels, Pixel Dungeons and Forgotten Runiverse to join this innovative staking system.

Continuing to show promise, MapleStory Universe’s Henesys blockchain has broken 70,000 DAUWs, while MapleStory N saw an in-game NFT sold for $12,694.

Additional news

30th May

Following a couple of weeks of heady activity, this one was quieter in terms of pure web3 gaming news. That’s not a sign that nothing’s going on, but more of an indication that moves are happening under the surface. After all, blockchain is a technology, and its integrations don’t always make for obvious headline news. 

NFT marketplace OpenSea has dropped its beta label for its OS2 update. Despite competitors, such as Blur and Magic Eden, OpenSea has stood its ground over the years and is now becoming an all-in-all crypto platform enabling token swaps in addition to NFT trades with cross-chain support spanning 19 networks. The company’s recent appointment of its first global gaming ambassador, Kyle ‘Mongraal’ Jackson, is also an encouraging sign of its belief in the future of game NFTs. 

Disney+ has rolled out its new always-on loyalty program. Although it’s not officially saying it’s integrating NFTs, the program now includes access to Dapper Labs’ Disney Pinnacle NFT collectibles. It’s a big deal for Dapper Labs which has been quietly operating Disney Pinnacles on its Flow blockchain for the past 18 months.

Another the-revolution-is-a-slow-train-coming news includes Oncade and its $4 million seed funding announcement. Not a web3 gaming distribution platform per se, Oncade is a newly launched game distribution and marketing platform rolled out in the wake of the unbundling of Apple and Google’s app store walled gardens. 

Enabled by stablecoins, it offers immediate crypto payments, but its stronger selling point is how it hopes to position gaming communities – web2 as well as web3 – as a core element of marketing.

In contrast, fully-fledged web3 community YGG has launched its expanded vision including what it calls “casual degen” game publishing. As for what this means, it will leverage “crypto degen” mechanics in terms of risk and rewards in its casual games, with the first title LOL Land recently rolled out on Abstract.

Nexpace’s Avalanche-based Henesys blockchain has seen onchain activity levels rise steadily following the launch of its MSU marketplace and MMORPG MapleStory N. Hitting 50,000 DAUWs, although this has decreased due to bot prevention measures, it’s surpassed both social RPG Pixels and combined wallet activity on Immutable zkEVM.

Additional news

23rd May

Unfortunately this week has come with more web3 games announcing their final chapter. 

  • First Light Games is discontinuing development of mobile battle royale Blast Royale. Going forward, the game will officially close down on 30th June, but will be open-sourced from 1st June. 
  • Tatsu Works is sunsetting its RPG life sim Tatsumeeko: Lumina Fates, stating that by closing down the game, the team can return to its roots. This means working on its new web2 game Project: Wander.
  • Bright Star Studios announced it’s shutting down Ember Sword with immediate effect as a result of insufficient funding.

Of course, canned web3 games are an inevitable part of the industry. The reason we’re seeing a wave of them closing down now, is because most web3 game funding was raised in 2021 and 2022, so now, or yesterday, is likely to be a time many teams are running out of funding, unless they’re able to raise more.

Keep track of the games officially shutting down or rebooting as web2 experiences in 2025 via our list.

On a brighter note, one studio securing new funding recently is German developer Voya Games, announcing it’s raised $5 million for fully onchain mobile/browser idle resource game Craft World. The round was led by cypto VC 1kx and traditional VC Makers Fund. A strong selling point behind Voya is its CEO Oliver Löffler, a co-founder at mobile idle game developer Kolibri Games, which was acquired by Ubisoft for over $160 million in 2020.

Shoutout to CCP Games and Leah Callon-Butler for the new cap. We love it!

Gunzilla Games’ Off The Grid is expanding beyond Epic Games Store, Xbox series X and PS5, with an expected launch on Steam in June 2025. The Avalanche-based extraction shooter will launch with full cross-play support across all platforms, allowing players to squad up and compete regardless of hardware. There’s not been any mention of its web3 features, but granted Steam still doesn’t allow any such integration, we’d assume it will be a pure web2 version of the game.

Nexon’s MapleStory Universe developer Nexpace attended Avalanche’s London Summit this week, where CBO Dominic Jang shared the team’s wider vision for recently launched MapleStory N and the MSU ecosystem. For while PC MMORPG MapleStory N has hit $1.6 million in NFT trading during its first week – both in-game items and characters – the game itself is not Nexpace’s main focus. Instead, Jang said the measure of success will be the day another ecosystem app is bigger than MapleStory N.

Additional news

16th May

Following on from last week’s main news, Nexon’s PC MMORPG MapleStory N has now launched. Despite overwhelmed servers and some maintenance issues, it seems to have gone fairly smoothly.

While the MapleStory Universe scrolls were still minting last week, it eventually ended in over 1.7 million free NFTs minted in total. As a result, the number of new users on Avalanche shot off, seeing the network hit 6 million wallets, and over 3 million monthly active users.

Alongside game launch, the NXPC token launched via a series of central exchanges too. Since TGE, its price has dropped somewhat from $2.96 to $2.65.

Continuing its gaming roll, Avalanche also saw the addition of Paradise Chain, the blockchain supporting Paradise Tycoon, Paradise Legends, and other future games from Finnish developer Empires Not Vampires.

Another significant developer moving its games to Avalanche is Pixelmon with its mobile RPG Warden’s Ascent being the first to launch.

Well timed then, Avalanche is hosting its Avalanche Summit in London on 20-22 May 2025, where you can catch our editor-at-large Jon Jordan.

Crazy Defense Heroes enables IAPs using TOWER tokens

One of the first web3 games to leverage the scrapped Apple 30% tax is Animoca Brands’ mobile tower defense game Crazy Defense Heroes, which this week announced it’s rolled out payment options including the use of TOWER tokens. These can now be used to buy exclusive IAPs via an app link-out to the game’s webstore. With 540 partner projects in its portfolio and a leading star to many web3 apps and companies, Animoca showing it can be done and work could prove hugely significant to the future of mobile web3 gaming.

Animoca eyeing IPO

So it’s not without substance that Animoca Brands has also unveiled plans to IPO in the US. Indeed, it makes a lot of sense considering the growth Animoca has seen in recent years, the power house it’s become, and the softening of US crypto regulations.

GotW: Blocklords – Battleborne

A long time coming, Blocklords has released its most significant game update yet with the addition of battle mode. This adds strategic depth to the game by letting players set up battle units and go head to head in real-time battles against NPCs. All the important resources grinded throughout a year and a half of farming is finally coming into significant play as these restore and power up the troops.

If there was any doubt, Blocklords is still one of the most ambitious web3 game out there by miles, and it’s still only in open beta. Get grinding – and battling – folks.

All about Wildcard

Perhaps the most ambitious game within the realms of web3, however, is Wildcard from Playful Studios, in development for seven years. Although technically a web2 game, this card collectible action (CCAG) MOBA has the exciting element of Thousands, its web3 streaming platform, which came about due to the developer not finding Twitch sufficient to meet its needs.

Discover all about the web2/web3 Wildcard ecosystem in our recent interview with Playful CEO Paul Bettner and game designer Brad Weir.

Additional news

9th May

Sometimes the news isn’t what’s happening but what’s going to happen, and that’s been the case this week as we prepare for the global launch of Nexon’s PC MMORPG MapleStory N on 15th May.

Technically, you can actually pre-install the 22 GB game ahead of time but the headlines have been made by the free mint of the MSU Scroll NFT via OpenSea. Hitting 300,000 mints within 12 hours, the total is now over 800,000. You have until 12th May to get yours!

Another event happening next week is the collaboration between Sui shooter Xociety and Adidas, which will see 2,500 skin packs being minted with prices ranging from $90 to $130. Each pack will contain various selections of Adidas-branded skins plus gain its holder an allocation of the XO token whenever it goes live. 

AI agents are always in the news and this week GOAT Gaming launched the first version of its AlphaGOAT agents in the shape of Amy, who you can chat to – obvs – as well as attempt to bet in a game on Waifu Clash on Telegram. No doubt more functionality will be added in due course. 

Move-to-earn project Sweat also added an agent called Mia, but its purpose was to help users deal with the previously Near-only app going multichain. Presumably it will also encourage us to do more exercise too at some point. 

Other news included: 

2nd May

Enthusiasm levels are on a high this week as some of the most prominent and anticipated web3 games topped our headlines:

Pixels’ PIXEL staking system has gone live. This highlights Pixels’ bigger play-to-earn vision as it expands into a multi-game ecosystem. As part of this, Pixels will also be the first major game to integrate Apptokens. Ahead of the announcement, editor-at-large Jon Jordan caught up with CEO Luke Barwikowski to get all the alpha.

  • Nexon’s first release within its MapleStory Universe ecosystem, PC MMORPG MapleStory N, will launch on 15th May. One of the most anticipated web3 games over the last two years, MapleStory N is developed by Nexon’s web3 arm Nexpace. It will launch on Avalanche-based L1 Henesys alongside the NXPC token, player-to-player marketplace, and UGC features. 
  • Paul Bettner has unveiled some stats following the initial live streams of Playful Studios’ MOBA Character Collection Action Game Wildcard. More than the impressive stats in themselves, it’s also a strong indication of a very well made web2 game with intentional integration of web3 rewards made possible through its spectator platform Thousands. For those interested in learning more (and you should be) we’ve got an in-depth interview with Bettner going live next week. 

Clickbait-y rumours had it that Pokemon Home was launching NFTs. Although the news wasn’t quite that exciting, Nintendo does appear to be using web3 gaming infrastructure Parasol Technologies in the mobile version of its Pokémon Home app. At least the company includes Parasol in the English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian versions of its updated Privacy Terms.

Hot take of the week: Apptokens can only be a good thing, and perhaps the only thing, saving the currently sinking ship that is web3 game tokens.

Additional news

25th April

After two years of development, Ubisoft and Immutable have unveiled the result of their collaboration. Launching towards the end of 2025, the game is a strategy TCG called Might & Magic Fates, which is based on the Might & Magic universe. 

In terms of web3 features, players will be able to trade their cards, however this is fully optional and adds no competitive advantages.

No doubt, it will be well made, but will the Might & Magic IP in combination with the TCG genre provide a breakthrough for web3 adoption? Nonetheless, it could prove to become the best web3 TCG yet.

In a turn of events, PLAY token entity Ready Maker (Gibraltar) has overturned Ready Games US’ legal case which saw the Supreme Court of Gibraltar freezing 450 million tokens in February 2025. 

Overturning the injunction, the judge pointed out that Ready US had been non-compliant since March 2023 and dissolved as a company in March 2024. It also noted that the initial freezing order had resulted in a sharp fall in the PLAY token price. A further hearing on 25th April 2025 will determine the indemnity costs payable to PLAY. Stay tuned, as they say. 

Further to our recent discussions about Apptokens, Pixels has announced it will be the first major game to integrate Limit Break’s protocol. As part of major changes coming to Pixels, CEO Luke Barwikowski announced the creation of the vPIXEL token, which will be a token that can only be spent or staked. Backed 1:1 against PIXEL, players will however be able to withdraw vPIXEL without any fees, using it in partnered games such as Forgotten Runiverse.

With a previous statement that its FIFA-licensed mobile football game FIFA Rivals would launch “in summer 2025”, it’s now confirmed that the game is aiming for a 14th June launch, alongside FIFA kicking off its Club World Cup. Prior to its global launch, the game is set for pre-release in specific regions in May.

With Jurassic World being the highlighted experience for its current Alpha Season 5, The Sandbox keeps rolling out new experiences regularly, one particularly enjoyable based around The British Museum.

In other major The Sandbox news this week, the platform has signed a multi-year deal with Bruce Lee Enterprises. Initially, there will be a Bruce Lee hub making its way into The Sandbox, with the later addition of a solo experience called Tao of the Dragon.

On 3rd-4th June, Pocket Gamer Connects is making its debut in Spain’s main tech hub and economic centre Barcelona. Do you want to be a speaker?

Additional news

18th April

It may be the Easter holidays but blockchain gaming news waits for no-thing, especially in a week in which Immutable’s year-long Perpetual Rewards – previously called The Main Quest – finally dropped its first rewards.

In total, around $230,000 of IMX tokens were given away, with the top wallet getting $8,467-worth of IMX. That stated, the prize pool for the coming week is down to around $90,000. Over time, other assets including game NFTs will also be added into the mix.

Of course, the point of the exercise is to encourage people to play as many Immutable games as possible and for as long as possible. Although each reward key costs 500 gems, the more you play the rarer your key, and the rarer the key, the better the rewards.

Other news this week included Shrapnel revealing more details about its Chinese expansion. All players will play within the same game world, but Chinese gamers will have their own separate NFT marketplace, although it’s expected that assets will be transferable between marketplaces.

Another interesting snippet is that console shooter Off The Grid reportedly generated more than $1 million in revenue last month. That’s not much considering it’s raised over $100 million but at least it’s a start. If nothing else, the game is still in early access and running on the Gunz’s testnet.

Jenny Jordan 986 posts 0 comments

Jenny started editing the Big Blockchain Game List in 2021; something that quickly sparked a passion for good blockchain projects and future possibilities for the whole industry.

Apart from editing BlockchainGamer.biz, she's a content marketing editor, keeping busy running, cold-plunging, deadlifting, and drinking too much coffee.

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