DappRadar x BGA Games Report – Blockchain Games Continue To Defy The Bear Market

This report covers the most important events that occurred over the last couple of weeks which make blockchain games one of the fun categories in the dApp industry.

Key takeaways

• Splinterlands continues to be one of the top Blockchain games with 350,000 daily UAW in May while giving a big step towards decentralization 

• Illuvium generates $72 million from its first land sale; the event shows the advantages of Layer2 solutions like Immutable

• Galaverse reveals major plans for the Gala ecosystem including GRIT, Project Saturn, and major updates to TWD Empires and Mirandus

• Investments keep pouring into blockchain games with $1.4 billion raised by Web3 games and related Metaverse projects since May

• STEPN registers 2 million monthly users as the move-to-earn paradigm keeps adding exercise enthusiasts

Blockchain games seem to be a savior in this historical bear market. First with Illuvium landing sale and then the brewing of Galaverse and new move-to-earn projects.

That aside, with the Crypto market falling drastically in market cap, the dApp industry seems not to be exempted. Just like the Crypto market falling in value and now below $1 Trillion for the first time since 2020, the dApp industry has also now fallen to its lowest point since last September, registering 2.22 million Unique Active Wallets (UAW) daily.

Blockchain games, on the other hand, now defying the bear market, and confirming their status as a blockchain vertical during bear seasons, have now reported having 1.15 million UAW daily interactions, on average in May, decreasing just by 5% from last month.

Splinterlands Just Keeps Rolling – 350,000 Daily UAW Amid Bear Market

Despite the Bear market, the leading blockchain game, Splinterlands, continues to win, dominating the gaming scene with its dynamic trading card mechanics eight months in a row, and the achievement of 350,000 UAW daily, in May. As if that wasn’t enough, Splinterlands also achieved a successful sale of SPS Validator node licenses. On May 26, the popular hive game, Splinterlands, had its first 2,000 validators node licenses sold out in less than 15 minutes, burning 14.5 million SPS and allocating almost $4 million to the game’s DAO.

SPS node licenses will be very useful to the decentralized future of Splinterlands ecosystem which will rely on a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) as the consensus mechanism to approve all transactions. SPS holders will be allowed to own a governance vote to help improve the future of Splinterlands’ DAO. Besides delegating SPS to earn part of the rewards allocated to the validator node, players will also be able to acquire the node licenses in the game’s marketplaces, allowing a fairer game rewards distribution.

Illuvium Land Sale Generates $72 Million And Lays Blueprint For Future NFT Sales

Illuvium also seems not to acknowledge the bear market, with its game’s first land sale. Ethereum’s open-world RPG, Illuvium, had a successful sale of 20,000 land plots between June 2 to June 4, generating 4,018  ETH worth $72 million at the time of the sale. This successful land sale marks the first milestone in one of the first true AAA blockchain games. This sale also lays a blueprint on how scaling solutions like L2 and sidechains should become the best option to host any type of blockchain game transactions. 

Before the land sale, in Q1, Illuvium launched its private Beta which gave a lot of players a real taste of battle action that contains the magical creatures Illuvials. Also, Illuvium which will run on Immutable-X (IMX), an Ethereum layer-2 solution that optimizes gas fees whilst enjoying Ethereum’s infrastructures advantages, is working on releasing a mobile version called Illuvium Zero whereby players will be able to build an industrial virtual complex to mine resources.

Galaverse Reveals Major Plans

Gala Games seem to be lowkey building an empire in the blockchain game space, with its ecosystem already owning some live games in Spider Tanks and TownStar, and also some other digital assets for games like TWD, and Mirandaus, one of the most hyped Web3 games already available in Ethereum marketplaces. That aside, the Gala game ecosystem is really a unique one, with its reliance on decentralized nodes run by the players that power up all Gala game dApps.

Gala Games hosted its conference, the Galaverse, in Malta, which took place from June 6 to June 8.  At the conference, the team at Gala Games unveiled some enticing partnerships and shed some light on upcoming milestones for some of the dApps within their ecosystem. 

First, the team announced that the shooter game GRIT will be available on Epic Games Store. The blockchain game will be like an eye-opener to the 30 million active Epic Games Store users, introducing them to Web3 games. Gala also announced its partnership with Project Saturn, which will become a Battlestar Galactica-themed Web3 game that would be under the Gala Games ecosystem. Gala also partnered with Universal Pictures, to get rights for the IPs. Gala’s relationship with AMC to develop Walking Dead Empires is another example of a prominent partnership Gala made.

Additionally, Gala Games will be home to Forever Winter, a horror shooter game, and a game studio mostly built by developers that worked on The Witcher 3, which was considered one of the best games in recent years. Gala Games also partnered with Last Expedition, a TPS highly anticipated game developed by the creators of Halo and COD. All In all, Gala Games is aiming to be a Web3 game powerhouse in the coming years.

Although the price of the GALA token couldn’t escape the contagious bear market, after all, the GALA token follows a similar logic to that of Bitcoin (BTC) with a limited supply and yearly halvings. The next big event in the Gala Games universe seems to be the Mirandus Exemplars airdrop. This airdrop will reward MTRM, Mirandus’ token, and will also be considered for the next playtest of Mirandus.

A16z & Dapper Labs Lead May’s Gaming And Metaverse Investments With $1.3 Billion In Investments

Another win in the blockchain games is the jaw-dropping capital invested into the Metaverse and other game projects. Just this year alone, in 2022, roughly $4.9 billion has been reported to have been invested into Metaverse and gaming including blockchain infrastructure as well as guilds and incubators to boost the gaming outlook. The $600 Million devoted by a16z to create the Games Fund One, a branch that will focus on boosting games studios and infrastructure, was not included in that amount.

Another jaw-dropping capital invested was the $725 million raised by Dapper Labs to expand further the Flow ecosystem. All of these facts of capital flowing into the Metaverse and blockchain gaming only seem to be a positive sign because, despite the market condition, it’s good to know companies still have fate in blockchain gaming. And apparently, with 33% of the capital raised this year already gone to infrastructure projects while 25% already raised by Metaverse gaming projects themselves, at the time of writing, these investments don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon but only seem to continue to grow as time goes on. 

STEPN Registers 2 Million Monthly Users As Move-To-Earn Continues To Shine

Market crash and ecosystems imploding aside, STEPN came up with the rise of move-to-earn (M2E) as a Web3 paradigm. M2E, just as its name applies, is again an earning method on the blockchain that allows users to earn tokens as a reward based on their physical activity. This type of earning method, as being one of the hottest topics in the blockchain industry, as it is an alluring concept in Web3. Plus, exercising while earning can become a good alternative to not getting overshadowed by the bear market.

Although not just STEPN offers this M2E method, some other dApps are also ranking their way with the M2E method. (Even though most of them are in early stages). Genopets, Dotmoovs, StepApp, Olivex, all these dApps also offer the M2E earning method.

However, STEPN is still the most popular M2E dApp of them all, having at least 2 million users monthly, according to TechCrunch. The project’s governance token, GMT, also appears to be a popular option among investors as the number of unique wallets (262,000) holding the GMT token keeps increasing even during this whole negative market sentiment. 

Conclusion

Apparently, the Blockchain gaming industry seems to be a really good helping hand in this historical bear market. And the fact that more investments are being poured into this industry and the companies are really keen on boosting the adoption rate is just an amazing thing. Finding a really good amount of blockchain games with truly immersive game mechanics that take entertainment to the next level is actually starting to not be that scarce anymore, and we are only looking forward to seeing that it eventually gets so rampant that virtually everyone plays blockchain games.