A Pudgy Penguins-IP game "made for Web3 degens"

GAMING CHRONICLES 111

Raiden

and

Memento | Oscar

Mar 19, 2025

Gaming Chronicles focuses on curating the latest web3 gaming news, every week.

You will find the latest news, educational content, and game reviews.

TLDR :

Multiple raises in gaming
Ronin announcements
LOL Land the game

🗞️ NEWS

LOL.LAND.GAME

Following a teaser about its showcase at the WolvesDEN, LOL Land revealed more details about the game this week:
- LOL Land is a browser-based casual board game made for Web3 degens. The trailer shows some of the gameplay, which can be described as a casino-like board game experience, where players roll to get lucky and grow their bank
  - Players can earn YGG tokens and collect points and exclusive NFTs. I assume the game will monetize via selling dice rolls
- It's similar to Monopoly in a way, but (seemingly) much more degen. We don’t know yet whether the game will have some type of meta-progression elements and lean more into gaming than just casino
  - A similar Web3 comparison to LOL Land might be CityVerse Tycoon
The game will launch on Abstract on April 15, an exclusive launch. It doesn’t seem very streamable, however, uses the Pudgy-IP and licensed characters from known community members (e.g. Aaron Teng)
- Gacha Game, another casino-like experience, has been one of the most successful apps on Abstract so far
  - On a side note, it’s interesting to see how Gacha is a distribution network as well, to bring attention to other tokens to a spending and degen audience (e.g. Abster)
Summarized: brought by YGG x involvement from the Pudgy Penguins community and IP x a degen title catered to CT x launching on Abstract = pretty good recipe for potential success

MULTIPLE RAISES IN GAMING

5 game and infra builders announced they raised in the past week (probably because of GDC). Let’s lay it out:
- EPHYRA (formerly Game Beast) $10.5M Series A:
  - With this name change the company seems to have pivoted to creating AI-powered companions, facilitated through a Web3 gaming platform
    - Formerly, it was planning to build a UGC content tooling platform for Roblox and strategic game and data acquisitions
  - They also announced they raised $3.7M in pre-seed funding in September 2024
- Kamigotchi $1.3M Seed Round:
  - Kamigotchi is building a fully on chain idle MMORPG combining strategy, pet-raising, and PVP
  - Apix, who’s also on the cap table has been pretty vocal about the game, praising its novelty plus the potential flywheel of a FOCG x Initia (network of rollups) x token on baseline
- PlaysOut $7M Seed Round:
  - We mentioned PlaysOut a couple of times before, and they’re building a Web3 mini-game and SDK platform (infra to publish, monetize, and reward users on mini-games outside of WeChat)
    - Plus they partnered with Tencent to bring 1000s of WeChat games to Telegram
  - The funds will be used to build high-quality mini-games, scale their ecosystem, and lock in key partnerships with super apps
- Slingshot DAO $16M (unknown round):
  - One day before its token launch Slingshot DAO announced this significant round of $16M (likely a token round)
  - Slingshot is a publisher of Roblox games built by AI, and according to its website it has shipped 1000+ games, generated over $25M, and paid out $3.1M+
    - How it works: Roblox devs can publish their game concepts on the website, SLING token holders can vote on the best idea, and end the end of each season the highest-voted games receive funding and support
- M10 $3M Seed round:
  - M10 is a new Web3 developer and publisher creating competitive multiplayer games, starting its debut title with a shooter
  - The studio aims to tackle the challenges in F2P gaming, specifically hyper-aggressive monetization and seeks to create opportunities for players to generate value within games
  - Mohamed, the CEO, commented: “We are willing to go much further than other studios to create a truly fun novel shooter experience whilst taking a swing at changing the future of F2P games.”
Overall this puts the funding of crypto games, protocols, and infra well over $100M this year (according to Blockchaingamer.biz). Do note that YoY funding has been seeing a sharp decrease from 2021 on

RONIN ANNOUNCEMENTS

A couple of noteworthy announcements coming from Ronin in the past week:
- Firstly, there was the OpenSea announcement:
  - Currently, Ronin NFTs are only accessible on the Ronin market. This is going to change as the NFTs become available on OpenSea soon, which should be a huge unlock in visibility, accessibility, and so liquidity
    - For context: OpenSea has a cumulative NFT volume of $40B+, and for Ronin, this number is ~$2.88B (note: the majority of OS volume is driven by ETH)
    - I do assume people will still need a Ronin wallet to access Ronin NFTs, so I wonder what that integration will look like
- Secondly, Ronin is “Supercharging DeFi for Gamers”
  - Ronin will expand into DeFi by attracting and retaining more liquidity (increasing TVL), enhancing the UX of on chain experience, and onboard new users (who hopefully stay on Ronin for the games)
    - Furthermore, an image in the thread says that you will be able to put “the tokens in your wallet to work” with DeFi soon
  - DeFi on Ronin will take multiple forms, including LPing, programmatic swaps, borrowing and lending, in-game yield, and liquid staking
  - Furthermore, Jihoz commented: “Defi innovation and adoption is actually a key leading indicator of web3 gaming adoption.”
- Thirdly, ERC721C/1155C and Apptokens (ERC20C) are now live on Ronin:
  - This will allow NFT creators to enforce royalties on a protocol level and create programmable token economies
  - We talked more about the tech in issue #101:
    - “Developers will be able to define how tokens can be bought, sold, and spent on a very granular level in-app and onchain, unlocking a ton of new applications and ideas”
  - Trung commented on Apptokens: “This is super relevant for studios to build out a sound web3 gaming business model based on familiar web2 knowledge.”
Lots of exciting developments on the Ronin chain, the bear is for building “serious things”