The first gaming studio of 2026 "goes out without a bang"
GC ALPHA 80
MARKET TALK
BOOMLAND CLOSES ITS DOORS
After 3+ years of operations, the Boomland team shared that it is closing its doors: “We truly did everything we could to keep the project alive, and we stayed in the fight for as long as it was realistically possible”
The studio’s flagship game, Hunters on Chain (HoC), will remain live for the next 12 months (incl. NFT + token functionality). After that, the servers will shut down
Boomland was founded in 2021, spun out of the (traditional) gaming studio Boombit. One of the most successful titles that this studio produced was Hunt Royale (HR). HoC is essentially the (not so successful) crypto version of HR
Based on its previous success (4M+ downloads back then), the Boombit team decided to bring over HR (as HoC) to crypto in 2022 as its flagship
Unfortunately, this playbook of bringing “successful” (and often dated) games over from Web2 to crypto never worked well. Teams often didn’t change anything about the gameplay, didn’t understand this audience, couldn’t figure out a monetization model, and overestimated the TAM
Interestingly, HR remained Boombit’s 2nd-highest-grossing game in H1 2025. The game generated $3.92M revenue in the first half of last year, with the company’s total revenue being $15M
Boomland introduced HoC in May 2022, just after the P2E supercycle (AXS was back at “only” $20 at that point). This was the first period in which some studios tried to pivot away from the “pure P2E label” and push more on concepts such as player-owned, community-driven, etc.
Back then, it also introduced 2 tokens: BOOM (governance) and BGEM (utility and rewards). Both tokens aren’t trackable on CMC or Coingecko anymore, which is telling us enough about how these tokens are performing atm
Other than tokens, it also introduced a Hunters NFT collection. More NFT collections were introduced in the following years
A few months after the introduction of the game (Q2 - Q3 2022), crypto went into a bear market and hasn’t really recovered to what it was before. This unfortunate timing is reflected in the game’s “scanty” funding
In May 2023, BoomLand raised $1M in a pre-seed round from VCs and Polygon Labs, the only public funding round that I was able to find
In June 2022, the company partnered with Polygon to launch HoC. As Polygon’s gaming division slowly fizzled out over the next two years, the game found its new home at Immutable in 2024
Other than that, in late 2024, the team ran a campaign in partnership with G7 (Lootdrop) to give away 100M BOOM tokens (~$1M). Plus, held another P2A campaign in early 2025
Unfortunately, that was equal to giving about 90+% of rewards away to bots
For the rest of 2025, the team remained pretty silent, without any further campaigns, updates, or regular comms. And we all know by now what that eventually leads to in this industry…
While it’s unfortunate to say yet another studio is closing down (one of many this year, I speculate), it shouldn’t come as shocking news either. Boomland didn’t raise much at all. The tokens were underperforming. Plus, it likely couldn’t generate any revenue with HoC as well. RIP to Boomland…
TAKEWAYS FROM SKARLY AND OCH
Around 3 weeks ago, we had Skarly on Sidelined to talk about OCH and its evolution into OCH World. There were some valuable nuggets (for builders) Skarly shared in this conversation, which I wanted to share today
I published the article 9 Lessons from The 8-Figure App that Kickstarted Abstract on Twitter first, which includes clips + additional takeaways. This segment is a condensed version of that
Launching on Abstract:
“It’s always a very big risk as a founder to choose to launch on an unproven chain, something that didn’t have mainnet.”
“We really chose Abstract, not because of the chain itself, or like narrative, or like whatever, or the tech, but because of the team behind it.”
Being one of the first-movers on a new L1 or L2 is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, much of the attention and liquidity will be concentrated on a few of the available apps. However, on the flipside, if the chain flops, your app won’t gain any traction. In this case, OCH did exceptionally well and had a significant impact on Abstract’s success
Changing the Seasonal Model:
“The season-based model’s meta progression was hurting us [...] We found that they (players) never wanted to join something [...] There are just so many negative emotions attached to S2 and beyond.”
“Timed seasons had this issue where people were feeling the pressure of how to get the most out of it within these two weeks...”
A timed season-over-season progression model can create emotional and structural baggage: (1) existing players lose motivations (2) new players feel excluded. Better models are a seasonal wipe (like Cambria) or a consistently live game (later in the lifecycle)
Economy Design:
“I’m walking this fine line, where I need to balance giving weapon and armor holders utility, because they played through S2, they should be rewarded, right? And also not making it such that they’re so OP that they just don’t need to play the game.”
“The quote goes something like, your holder base or player base will call you greedy, or you will go out of business. We need to figure out what that balance looks like.”
There’s a tension between rewarding loyal players and preserving progression. This is a challenge in how you design your progression systems
Once you issue an NFT collection, holders often expect perpetual utility. Designing around this expectation requires you to balance your business goals (e.g., monetization) with community sentiment
Complexity:
“Players that we have attracted, they want a more complex game, complex in the sense that, not that the game mechanics are complex, but they want [...] simple decisions that have big effects on their gameplay”.
“They don’t want a game that can be solved on day one. They want to really build strategies, they want to figure out metas, they want to be chatting in the Discord on how to min-max the gameplay”.
The CT-native audience wants depth from consequences, not from complex game mechanics. Figuring out the meta is the product and a core engagement loop for this audience.
From Onchain to Offchain:
“What do players care about? They care about settlement, so they care about money. We don’t want to hold their ETH offchain somehow, because then we can inflate it or deflate at will...”
“We found that 99.9% of people don’t care (about FOCG), as long as it works, as long as they trust the team.”
Players don’t care about decentralization. They care about the systems in place that prevent centralized powers to interfer when money is involved
Overall, it was an interesting conversation with Skarly that highlighted his experiences building and shipping OCH, plus gave insights into what his thoughtprocess is for OCH World
On the topic of onchain games, we had the founder of Stomp on last week
ON THE RISE
Disclaimer: None of this information should be taken as financial advice. My writings only represent my personal opinions. DYOR + I will hold some of the assets mentioned in this newsletter.